The Urban Fantasy Anthology (Peter S. Beagle) (Kitty Norville 1.50)

After leaving the Rookery, I flew up into a tree—not one of the old oaks on the property, but one further down the street where I could get a little privacy as I tried to figure out what to do next. Like most corbae, I think better on a roost or in the air. I knew just trying to talk to Donald’s mother wouldn’t be enough. At some point, I’d still have to, but first I thought I’d try to find out more about what exactly had happened to her children.

That made me cheer up a little because I realized it would be like having a case and looking into the background of it, the way a detective would. I’d be like a private eye in one of those old movies the Aunts liked to watch, late at night when everybody else was asleep except for Zia and me. And probably Lucius.

I decided to start with the deaths and work my way back from them. There was no point in trying to find the bee. As Lucius had said, unless it was a cousin, it would be long dead by now, and it didn’t make sense that it would be a cousin. I could look into it, I supposed, but first I’d try to find the driver of the car that had struck Madeline. A bee wouldn’t even be alive after thirty years, anyway. But a human might.

Most people know there are two worlds, the one Raven made and the other-world, where dreams and spirits live. But there’s another world that separates the two: the between. Thin as a veil in some places, as wide as the widest sea in others. When you know the way, it’s easy to slip from one to another and that’s what I do when I find myself standing in front of the locked door of Michael Clark’s house. It’s how Zia and I always get into places.

Slip into the between, take a step, then slip right back into Raven’s world. It’s as though you passed right through the door, except what you really did was take another, slightly more roundabout route.

I didn’t like it in Clark’s house when I got there that evening. There was an air of…unpleasantness about the place. I don’t mean that it smelled bad, though there was a faint smell of mustiness and old body odour in the air. It was more that this was a place where not a lot of happiness had ever lived. Because places hold on to strong emotions just the way people do. The man who doesn’t forgive? The house he lives in doesn’t either. The house full of happy, laughing children? You can feel its smile envelop you when you step through the door.

Clark’s name had been in that last clipping in the old lady’s scrapbook. When I looked it up in the telephone book, I found three listings for Michael Clark. The first two belonged to people much too young to be the man I was looking for, but this house…I knew as soon as I slipped inside that I was in the right place.

The front hall was messy with a few months’ worth of flyers and old newspapers piled up against the walls, the kitchen garbage overflowing with take-out food containers and pizza boxes, the sink full of dirty mugs and other dishes. But there weren’t any finished liquor bottles, or beer cases full of empties.

I found Clark sitting on the sofa in his living room, watching the TV with the sound off. Just as the rest of the place, this room was also a mess. Coming into it was like stepping onto a beach where the tide had left behind a busy debris of more food containers, newspapers, magazines, dirty clothes. A solitary, long-dead plant stood withered and dry in its pot on the windowsill.

Clark looked up when I came in and didn’t even seem surprised to see me. That happens almost as often as it doesn’t. Zia and I can walk into someone’s kitchen while they’re having breakfast and all they do is take down a couple of more bowls from the cupboard and push the cereal box over to us. Or they’ll simply move over a little to give us room on the sofa they’re sitting on.

In Clark’s case, he might have thought that I was another one of those personal demons he was obviously wrestling with on a regular basis.

I didn’t bother with any small talk.

“It’s not like they made it out to be,” the man said when I asked him about the night his car had struck Madeline. “I didn’t try to kill her. And I wasn’t drunk. I’d had a few beers, but I wasn’t drunk. She just stepped out from behind a van, right in front of my car. She didn’t even look. It was like she wanted to die.”

“I’ve heard people do that,” I said. “It seems so odd.”

“I suppose. But there are times I can understand all too well. I lost everything because of that night. My business. My family. And that girl lost her life. I took her life.”

There was more of that. A lot more.

When I realized I wasn’t learning anything here except how to get depressed, I left him, still talking, only to himself. I looked up at the night sky, then took wing and headed for the scene of the accident that Michael Clark kept so fresh in his mind.

Between my ghost boy’s mother and Michael Clark, I was beginning to see that the dead weren’t the only ones haunted by the past.

The place where Madeline had died didn’t look much different from any other part of the inner city. It had been so long since the accident, how could there be any sign that it had ever happened? But I thought, if her brother’s ghost was still haunting the bedroom where he’d died, then perhaps she hadn’t gone on yet either.

I walked along the sidewalk and down an alleyway, calling. “Hello, hello! Hello, hello!”

I did it, over and over again, until a man wrenched open one of the windows overlooking the alley. I looked up into his angry features, though with the light of the window behind him, he was more just a shadow face.

“It’s three o’clock in the morning!” he yelled. “Are you going to shut up, or do I have to come down there and shut you up?”

“You’ll have to come down,” I called back, “because I can’t stop.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I need to find a dead girl. Have you seen her?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

His head disappeared back into the apartment and he slammed the window shut. I went back to calling for Madeline until I heard footsteps behind me. I turned, warm with success, but it was only the grumpy man from the window. He stood in the mouth of the alley, peering down its length to where I stood.

He was older than I’d thought when I’d seen him earlier—late fifties, early sixties—and though he carried more weight than he probably should, he seemed fit. If nothing else, he smelled good, which meant he at least ate well. I hate the smell of people who only eat fast food. All that grease from the deep-frying just seems to ooze out of their pores.

“What’s this about a dead girl?” he asked.

I pointed to the street behind him. “She got hit by a drunk driver just out there.”