“Yes,” I whispered back.

  “Do you?”

  Before I could answer I discovered I was standing next to him in the middle of the damn ocean. The night was crystal clear and from my new vantage point I saw a coastline consumed by fog.

  “Oh shit!! I mean, oh Lord, I’m sorry, I believe you, okay? Cool. I got it, nothing is impossible. Okay?”

  “Very good,” he replied calmly. He crossed his arms as he admiringly surveyed the surroundings. “This is one of the places where I find serenity. Isn’t it beautiful here?”

  “Y-y-yes,” I replied, shivering, as sheets of ice-cold water lapped over my shoes. “Listen, I don’t think I can do this. I-I can’t swim.”

  “I would never let you drown.”

  The water rose up to my knees.

  “I know. I believe. But will you please take me back?”

  My heart pounded furiously as I kept sinking. Panicked, I desperately reached for the angel but he had vanished.

  “Enjoy your life, Vincent,” he whispered into my ears in a voice as low as rumbling thunder. Then a shrill horn blast almost tore my ears apart.

  In an instant I found myself in a most undignified position straddled across the top of the monkey bars. I clung to the bars a touch longer, then I managed to pry my fingers off and hop to the ground.

  My pants were soaked, but I didn’t care. I was grateful to be on land. Surprisingly the fog was gone. There wasn’t anyone else in the playground, thank goodness, but there were tons of people milling around on the Boardwalk.

  My watch had also started working. It read 10:11. Ordinarily I would have said that’s impossible but now I knew better. The very thought filled me with euphoria. I just burst out in giddy laughter as I strolled down the Boardwalk in the direction of my car. A few curious heads turned my way, but someone walking around talking and/or laughing to themselves in Venice Beach was no big deal.

  I even gave a hearty wave to Rasta Man as I walked up to his booth area. He eyed me a little warily until I said, “Hey, man, sorry about going off on you.”

  “It’s okay, my brotha,” he said tapping fists with me. “You feeling better now?”

  “I’m feelin’ great, bro. In fact, give me one of your best small-sized shirts for my son. Your choice.”

  “You got it.” He tore through one of the cartons and retrieved a Bob Marley shirt.

  “Oh that’s smokin’, partner,” I said offering him a sly grin which made him laugh.

  When I reached the block where my car was parked I just stood there with my mouth ajar. My Saab was completely totaled. A Coca-Cola truck was lodged into the driver’s side of my car and had rammed it into a telephone pole. The Saab walls were caved in like an accordion. A policeman stood beside the truck writing a report while the other one kneeled beside a man in handcuffs. And all I could think about was, if I had still been sleeping in that damn car … .

  “Hey, mister, too bad about your car.”

  The stink fumes and the creaky wheels of a stroller told me who stood next to me.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “They say the driver over there they got handcuffed was drunker than a brewery. He was weaving down the street, lost control of his truck and slammed right into your car. Damn shame. That was a nice Saab.”

  “Yes, it was.” I frantically searched through the pockets of my coat.

  “Whatcha looking for?”

  I sighed. “I think I lost my cell phone on the beach.”

  “Oh that’s all right, mister. You can use mine.” She pushed some magazines aside in her stroller and reached in and pulled out a cell phone more sophisticated than mine. I chuckled when she handed it to me.

  “Thanks. By the way, nice phone.”

  “It suits my needs,” she replied casually while scratching her ass. “You calling the insurance people?”

  “Yes, ma’am, right after I call my son.”

  HOUSEWORK

  by DOSELLE YOUNG

  I

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 27TH, 1947 8:38 P.M.

  ALIENIST DEFEATS DR. STILETTO

  DURING UNION STATION ASSAULT

  Misery City Hero Crushes Science-Villain Before Startled Onlookers

  MISERY CITY, Oct. 24—A battle between the Alienist and career criminal Dr. Stiletto erupted early Friday morning outside the offices of Midwestern Rail. The ensuing bloodbath left nine dead and twenty-seven injured including stenographer Margaret Willingham of Olathe, Kansas, and Steward Jeffries, a car salesman from Joplin, Missouri.

  Birdie McIntyre sat on a rickety stool at the end of the bar and tried as best she could to ignore the headlines, but that wasn’t gonna be easy. A kind of bad juju had crept into the bar that night, sliding in low and lazy across the hardwood floors to settle dead beneath her feet. Looking around the joint at all those smiling faces, Birdie couldn’t help but wonder if she was the only one able to see it; that unwanted shadow coiled like a rusty bedspring. Birdie wondered if maybe she hadn’t been the one to drag that dread in off the streets in the first place, right on in through those wide red double doors. Of course, if she was going to clean rich white folks houses for a living, she had to expect a certain amount of tension.

  Normally, a couple of swigs of Black & White Scotch whiskey should’ve been enough to dislodge a day’s worth of hurt; to give her a bit of that “fine and mellow” feeling she’d been so desperately in need of. But tonight she had already had herself three fingers of that dark liquor, her back still felt hard as rock and she was starting to believe all the whiskey in the world wasn’t going to make a lick of difference. She felt hot. Disoriented. And everything she set eyes on, from the working girls trolling for rent money at the far end of the bar to old Walt Tillman spilling a fifth of gin behind the counter, appeared to be little more than some nonsense collision of sight and sound.

  A thunderous, incoherent blur. What fun.

  After a few long moments, a light-skinned woman slid onto an empty stool next to Birdie. She placed one slender arm around the housekeeper and gave a big squeeze.

  This was Miss Ruby Brown.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” Ruby asked, her eyes registering genuine concern through a haze of gin and warm beer. “If the music ain’t hot enough for you, I can always tell Walt to throw some more change in the jukebox.”

  “Naw, girl. That ain’t it!” she replied. Birdie’s voice was noncommittal as she laid eyes on a mountainous Negro in a lavender wool suit who just seemed to appeared behind her friend. Birdie looked him up and down, then managed a weak smile as she added: “Looks like you’re having a good time, though.”

  Ruby looked back over her shoulder, laughed, then proceeded to purr her way through the introductions. “Oh, this here is that man I told you ’bout, sugah.” Ruby grabbed the towering oaf by the lapels and shoved him right up on her.

  “My new baby-sitter, Mister Darrell James. Firecracker thought it might be a good idea if y‘all two got to know each other a little better seeing as he’s gonna be ’round awhile.”

  “Is that right?”

  Birdie had met Ruby’s previous bodyguard, a wiry little snake named Milton Lamb, on more than one occasion and had never managed to warm to the ghoul. God forgive her, but when she’d heard Lamb had gone and gotten knifed to death after a poker game the cleaning lady didn’t shed any tears.

  Not that this new joker looked to be any better.

  “Don’t be shy, big man,” Ruby urged with a twinkle in her eye. “Be a gentleman and say hello to my girlfriend. She don’t bite.”

  Were it any other day, Birdie might have been amused by what Ruby was suggesting, but this had not been like any other day. At the moment, Birdie couldn’t give a good god damn about anything except the sound of the cicadas buzzing around inside her head. A hundred million voices droning away in the dark, like church music caught in a hiss of radio static; a million droning voices in the dead space between channels.

  A brief space opened up on the dance floor as Birdie cast her eyes across to the far side of the darkened room. There sat Ruby’s lover, a goatish, heavyset gangster named Hank “Firecracker” Chalmers, pretending to listen to a pair of furtive-looking white men who also occupied the booth.

  She watched as one of those white men dropped a bundle of papers, then scrambled to pick them up as Firecracker laughed and made some joke about that white man shining his shoes.

  The way Birdie understood it: Ruby had been straight fucking Firecracker for the last seven months, and making true love for the past three or four. Things had been going well. In reward, the gangster had set up his songbird in a fancy perch right off the plaza, complete with doorman, on-site laundry and underground parking. A married man, two rings flashed from the gangster’s ring fingers: a plain gold wedding band on his left hand and, on the right, another made to resemble a bundle of dynamite. A tiny cluster of diamonds on top was meant to mimic a sparkling fuse.

  Birdie suspected it must have been some buried sliver of guilt over the frequent last-minute abandonments, the rumored child that Ruby wasn’t allowed to bring to term or simply the mobster’s rough and tumble ways that persuaded him to yield to Ruby’s demand that she share her apartment with her long-suffering friend from the country.

  And that was how a simple cleaning woman from north of the river had come to share a gangster’s fuck pad with her best friend, Ruby Brown.

  “Pretty eyes,” the giant grumbled, the stink of Tillman’s gin on his breath. His teeth were yellow. Haphazardly arranged.

  “Didn’t catch that,” Birdie said as she physically withdrew from the stammering thug.

  “I said, you got damned pretty eyes. Prettier than a hen in a slaughterhouse … .”

  Birdie raised an eyebrow at that. But then, who the hell wouldn’t? Those teeth, she thought. You could grind sausage with those things. Even bone, maybe. Terrible things.

  Firecracker’s guard dog took off his hat and daubed a few oily beads of sweat from his brow. There was a lumpy, discolored scar along the top of his head. A rubbery keloid that looked to Birdie like some oddly placed zipper.

  The goon took a half step back, replacing his hat as the cleaning lady shuddered.

  “Buy y’all a few drinks?” he asked.

  “You do that.” Ruby gave the simpleton a pat on the back and watched as he leaned over the bar. “I heard they grew ’em simple up where he come from but I had no idea,” she whispered to Birdie.

  “Shit. You best find a word that means simpler than simple,” Birdie admonished, the two women leaning in closer to one another, their voices masked by the sound of a saxophone tuning up. “You must have been out of your damn mind bringing that big Frankenstein-looking niggah my way!”

  “Hush, chile! Hank just asked us to give him some privacy for a minute,” Ruby explained. “Besides, that big fool there might be as ugly as a big blind bulldog, but he knows how to make a dollar. Anyway, when was the last time a fella took your raggedy ass out for a bite to eat?”

  Birdie shot the blues singer a stinging look, shook her head, then leaned forward off her stool to peer at the back of the big man’s neck.

  “What’re you doin’, girl?” Ruby asked.

  “Checking for bolts!

  Birdie had always found Ruby’s laughter infectious, and as they laughed, those two, the cleaning lady had almost been able to forget the creeping shadow coiled beneath her feet. Still, it wasn’t too long before she felt her mouth start to go all salt dry and flat again; that dark unwanted memory soaking up every ounce of her remaining calm the way a sponge soaks up dishwater. For better or worse, the cat was out of the bag, Birdie’s eyes had seen the glory. What choice did she have but to learn to live with it?

  II

  The discovery had come hours earlier.

  That flu going around had cut the McClellan estate’s usual cleaning crew down from five to three. Today’s trio, which consisted of Birdie, assigned to the upstairs bedrooms and study, chatty Rita Mae Hines out in the garden tending to the weeds and her eldest daughter, Cosette, downstairs mopping the kitchen, found themselves spread thin, but doing the best they could to get the Craftsman fortress under control.

  Miraculously, Birdie managed to subdue most of the upstairs rooms quite easily before lunch. She then struggled for the better part of the afternoon to impose the faintest hint of order onto the dizzying clutter infecting. Mr. McClellan’s study. A cavernous, octagonal room filled floor to ceiling with inventive cabinetry, every book on every shelf appeared to Birdie as if it had been read to the brink of disintegration.

  “Such a mess,” she thought.

  And yet, Birdie had to admit, as a result of her hard work and elbow grease, the room had begun to take on a vague illumination, brightened and smelling now not merely of old paper, but lemon, honey and linseed oil.

  No small triumph, to be sure.

  Her hazel eyes darted over the walls of the study, leaping across a series of obscure portraits before they came to rest on a darkened fireplace at the far end of the room. And there, set above the mantelpiece, the cleaning woman spied an elaborate clock.

  As Birdie moved to get a closer look, the afternoon sunlight reflected off the clock’s face at odd angles, gracing the elaborate drop dial with a peculiar radiance that set it apart from the rest of the room.

  A glance at her wristwatch read the time as 3:45, but the drop dial’s gleaming face claimed half past twelve.

  And that wouldn’t do.

  Birdie found the hidden latch behind its faceplate. She opened the glass and slowly began rotating the hands to the correct position when a sudden burst of warm air, hot enough to raise a sweat, hit her full in the face.

  The cleaning lady turned.

  There, beside the fireplace, stood a door where previously none had existed. Pitch black. Howling. That portal had sprung open like a trap, and now Birdie found herself caught up in it. Temporarily paralysed.

  After a long moment, Birdie got up the guts to take a few cautious steps closer, convinced, for the moment, that the the door had not actually been breathing.

  Beyond the threshold, a flight of stairs wound down into a void; the sight of which made her body hum from the inside out, electric.

  Absently, Birdie rubbed her palms against her hips, wiping off the sweat as she stared down that dark, unforgiving curve leading God only knows where.

  At the bottom of that winding staircase lay a mammoth limestone cavern. A series of phosphorescent lanterns clung to the ceiling; gleaming stalactites that divided the space unevenly between patches of dark and light. Resting on the cave floor beneath each of those strange lamps sat one in a series of raised metal platforms.

  On the nearest of these were tables covered with hundreds of colorful glass tubes, racked like fist-sized crayons and staggered in alternating rows of complimentary hue.

  A laboratory of some kind?

  “Have you the slightest idea what a piss and bother it is to get dried blood out of leather?” a blustering voice spoke, nearly startling Birdie out of her skin. “It’s a frightful challenge, I dare say! Frightful!”

  Heart pounding, Birdie ducked behind some crates as a second voice interjected. “Pull yourself together, old man. Remember. It could have been worse. Could have been my blood on the jerkin and not my opponent’s.”

  “Pfah. Wouldn’t want that, would we, sir? Not after that debacle last year with the Silent Saint! I’d thought for certain you were going to lose that hand.”

  “That makes two of us,” the second voice replied.

  A pause, then the first voice continued, somewhat parental: “I take it you’ll be going out tonight?”

  “Standard patrol pattern,” the second man replied. “Need to let the usual suspects know I mean business. Long as crime doesn’t sleep, neither can I. Now fire up the machine, Silas,” the voice continued. “And put some real weight on the bar.”

  That first voice belonged to the blustering, fifty-something Englishman who had come into the office to hire the cleaning crew a few weeks earlier.

  Silas Murtaugh.

  When he’d first stepped into the Rucker Brothers offices, Birdie remembered the Londoner had worn a pristine three-piece gray wool suit and carried a silver pocket watch. Now in the cave he was working under theater lamps in a pair of olive drab trousers and a waistcoat, his grease-stained shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbows. Logic dictated, then, that that second voice had to belong to the owner of the house: Mr. Alistair McClellan.

  But what the hell were these two getting up to down here in the dark and what was it that had set Birdie’s skin to crawling?

  Murtaugh wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, then shoved the cloth into his back pocket.

  Then came a deep groan of machinery and the brief squeal of metal against metal as the Londoner took his place beside what looked a lot like an industrial drill press. Birdie had used such machines when she worked at the shipyards back in ’44, but nothing as complicated as this.

  Within moments, a great thrumming sound vibrated throughout the cavern, followed by a cascade of electricity as the great machine sprang to life. Not a drill press.

  Then what?

  A weight-training device of some kind?

  Birdie watched as a shirtless Alistair McClellan rolled his broad, pale shoulders and extended a hand towards his manservant, who promptly handed the millionaire a small luminous vial taken from the bench, one that she might easily have mistaken for a kind of vacuum tube.

  McClellan popped a hinged corked, tilted his head back and drank deep, the vial’s luminiscent contents emptying down his throat like a tincture made from the glowing guts of lightning bugs and fireflies.

  A moment later and the master of the house had set himself beneath the support bar and lay prone on an inclined bench. The cleaning lady counted diligently as the machinery roared, a number of Michelin-sized plates sliding weightlessly, one after another, onto either side of a central support bar.