Read Something More Than Night for Free Online

laneways. A couple doglegs later, surrounded by hucksters and lost souls and the occasional penitente, one could almost forget someone had died. She didn’t, though. I ought to have taken a different route through the lanes, but I wanted her to get a sense of where we were and where we were headed. I figured it’d be a gentle introduction to the Pleroma if I could play on her expectations a bit. But she was too busy noticing all the places her brother had lost his footing, giving little Bambi sighs each time we passed a spot where she’d hauled him to his feet, to give our heading any thought.
    Somewhere along the way she ditched the nightgown and reverted to her original outfit without even realizing what she’d done. And she gave no sign of feeling odd—no warning prickle in the primitive depths of the lizard brain, no dissonance in the seat of higher reasoning—when we shifted into the Pleroma. I tell you, the kid was a natural. But I wasn’t about to tell her that. Already high maintenance, this one.
    So there she was in a Melbourne laneway, neon shining on her wet eyes as she faced the gin mill where she’d had her last tiff with big brother. Then I opened the door for her, and with the next step she was a guest in my Magisterium. But it took her a moment to realize the gin mill had become a diner in the couple hours while her corpse lay in the snow, snarling up the traffic.
    A heavenly aroma greeted us, like a whiff of God’s own aftershave. Say what you will about the monkeys, but a side of bacon cures a lot of ills. I took a stool at the counter. Frayed batting poked through the cracked red leather, and both carried discolorations the color of spilled coffee. A waitress in a pink apron cleared away a plate of half-eaten pancakes drenched in syrup, then wiped down the counter. I could smell the maple on the plate and the cigarette smoke in her hair. Her dish towel had been white once, but it probably hadn’t seen the inside of a washtub since Roosevelt could dance. She tossed a paper menu at me. It landed in a wet spot left behind by her towel. She wore a name tag, but it was blurred in the same way a newspaper headline becomes blurred and indistinct when you try to read in a dream. I’d never caught her name in the mundane realm, back in the day, so here I’d glossed over that detail. Didn’t matter much. I called her Flo. She never objected.
    I pulled out a stool for flametop. “Park the body. Bite an egg.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “Sit down. Have something to eat.”
    “Why don’t you talk like a normal person?”
    “I’m not a person. Neither are you, any longer.”
    “Do all ‘angels’”—she put scare quotes around that—“talk like you do?”
    “Nah. Most of the others are old fluff.”
    She rolled her peepers and gave the joint a once-over. I knew what she saw because I’d constructed this little pocket reality all by my lonesome. It was the sort of place where a cup of joe cost a nickel and that was four cents too much for what it bought you. They didn’t serve decaf here. It was the sort of place that smelled of bacon grease and burned coffee and the sweat and pomade from the guy on the next stool. The sort of place where it didn’t pay to look too closely at the silverware, but where you could count on decent eats so long as you didn’t ask for anything poached, infused, or zested. Two palookas in overalls and flatcaps occupied a table along the storefront window, lamping the passing girls and arguing too loudly over the box scores. They’d been doing that since DiMaggio’s day; I added them as an homage, when he played his last game, and never got around to rearranging the place. It was comfortable. A ceiling fan with one missing blade tried to push the air around but the air was having none of it. Three houseflies buzzed around the fan, their aerials stuck on a permanent three-second loop, which lent the off-kilter sense of a filmstrip skipping its