Zero History

5. THIN ON THE GROUND
And when she’d watched him, from her chair, the collar of his coat popped like a
vampire’s cape, finally descend the stairs to Cabinet’s foyer, dropping further out of sight
with each step, she put her head back against slippery brocade and gazed at the spiraled
lances of the narwhale tusks, in their ornate rack.
Then she sat up and asked for a white coffee, a cup rather than a pot. The breakfast
crowd had mostly gone, leaving only Hollis and a pair of darkly suited Russian men who
looked like extras from that Cronenberg film.
She got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds.”
By the time her coffee arrived, she’d determined that The Gabriel Hounds was the title
of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, and had been or was the
name of at least one band.
Everything, she knew, had already been the title of a CD, just as everything had already
been the name of a band. This was why bands, for the past twenty years or so, had mostly
had such unmemorable names, almost as though they’d come to pride themselves on it.
But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, legend. Dogs heard
coursing, however faintly, high up in the windy night. Cousins it seemed to the Wild
Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there were even weirder variants. Some
involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This
had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children
who’d died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds
seemed to have originally been “ratchets,” an old word for dogs that hunt by scent.
Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes “gabble ratchets.” Inchmaleian totally. He’d name the right
band the Gabble Ratchets instantly.
“Left for you, Miss Henry.” The Italian girl, holding out a glossy paper carrier bag,
yellow, unmarked.
“Thank you.” Hollis put the iPhone down and accepted the bag. It had been stapled
shut, she saw, and she envisioned the oversized brass stapler atop the pornographic desk,
its business end the head of a turbaned Turk. A pair of identical business cards, multiply
stapled, held the two handles together. PAMELA MAINWARING, BLUE ANT.
She pulled off the cards and tugged the bag open, staples tearing through the glossy
paper.
A very heavy denim shirt. She took it out and spread it across her lap. No, a jacket. The
denim darker than the thighs of her Japanese jeans, bordering on black. And it smelled of
that indigo, strongly, an earthy jungle scent familiar from the shop where she’d found her
jeans. The metal buttons, the rivet kind, were dead black, nonreflective, oddly powderylooking.