by Peter Roman
I brushed the dust off my rented car and hit the road again.
AN ANGEL’S TRAP
I’m sorry.
I was telling you about Penelope.
You’ll understand if sometimes I need to take a break from that.
And if you don’t, well, you didn’t know her like I did.
I stayed with Penelope for a few days after resurrecting, recovering my strength and stretching out the kinks of death. I tried to think about my next move, but I didn’t have one I could see now that Gabriel had likely disappeared again. So I just followed Penelope around through the woods as she looked for things to photograph.
The more I was around her, the more that feeling of familiarity grew. Normally I was agitated after resurrecting, and hungry. But there was something about Penelope’s presence that calmed me. Maybe it was a gift she had. Or, to be more accurate, another gift. Because I discovered she really could see things that other people couldn’t. She wasn’t a fraud, like I’d suspected at first.
We climbed a hill so she could take a photograph of some moss-covered rocks in a jumble at the top. Each of the rocks was larger than me.
I couldn’t see anything special about them and said as much.
“That’s because you think they’re rocks,” she said.
I looked at them again. “Aren’t they?” I asked.
She studied them and then set up her camera. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think they’re bones.”
I looked at them again, and now I saw what she saw. But I hadn’t until she’d pointed it out.
“Can you step clear of the shot?” she said.
I stood to the side and let her work. “What do you think they’re bones from?” I asked.
She shook her head and moved the camera to the side for a different angle on the bones. “I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe someone in one of the spiritualist associations will.”
I doubted that, but it was probably better if they didn’t know. Some things are better left forgotten and hidden away under moss.
Another day, we set out on a hike with no destination. When I asked Penelope where we were going, she just shrugged. “Let’s see where the day leads us,” she said.
The day led us to a waterfall. She set up the camera and took photographs of the black rocks behind the water while I gazed into the depths of the pool. The water was as dark as the rocks, but even without using any grace to sharpen my vision I could make out the claw marks all along the bottom of the pool. Massive gouges in the stone. I didn’t point them out to her. She shook her head at the falls.
“Maybe there was something here once,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s here anymore.”
Maybe she was right. And maybe whatever had been here was on its way back. I didn’t want to stick around to find out so I breathed a sigh of relief when she packed up her camera and pushed her way back through the underbrush rather than set up a picnic lunch.
At night she told me about all the things she’d seen in her travels. The footprints of dwarves in an abandoned mine in Oregon, where torches lit on their own at night.
A white horse that came out of a foggy field in Michigan and spoke in a foreign tongue to her before galloping off. She thought the language may have been Gaelic but she wasn’t sure.
A mermaid’s body washed up on rocks on an inaccessible part of the New York coast. When she came back with her camera, the tide had carried it away again.
There was no way she had stumbled across all of these things accidentally. One strange encounter in a lifetime, maybe. Two, unlikely. Three, impossible. Which meant that if she was telling the truth she had a sense for the supernatural like I had a sense for the angels. And with each day that passed I was less inclined to doubt her.
Given that, it probably wasn’t happenstance that she had stumbled upon me in the graveyard just as I was resurrecting. This suspicion was confirmed when she added a new photograph to the wall one night. Me erupting from the ground with a mouthful of dirt, knocking over the simple wooden cross that someone had stuck in my grave.
“I thought you were photographing a sasquatch when we met,” I said, but she only shrugged.
“This is what the camera saw,” she said.
I could have used that moment to tell her about myself, but I didn’t. I liked her, and, as I mentioned earlier, people don’t tend to stick around when they learn about my true nature. I didn’t want to drive her away.
She continued to share the last of her supplies with me at night—the cans of beans and some hard chocolate bars. One night she even brought out a bottle of wine. We took turns drinking straight from the bottle, because there weren’t any glasses in the shack.
When the bottle was nearly done, I asked her if she’d ever photographed any angels. She shook her head. “I’m not even sure any are still alive,” she said, looking out the window.
“How do you know they existed at all?” I asked her.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she said.
Okay. Interesting.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” I asked, but she smiled and waved a finger at me.
“I should be the one asking you the questions,” she said. “Not the other way around.”
Fair enough, but that was a route I didn’t want to go down, so I opted to change the subject instead.
“What are you going to do when your supplies run out?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Go get more supplies,” she said. “And find a new place to explore.” She smiled at me. “Who knows what I’ll find there?”
It felt like one of those moments where I could have leaned in for a kiss, but I didn’t. Maybe I should have. Maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe they would have turned out the same. But they turned out the way they turned out.
A couple of days before the supplies ran out and we had to hike back to civilization, I decided to show Gabriel’s cave to Penelope. I don’t know why. Maybe because I felt so comfortable with her. Maybe because I felt I owed her something for caring for me after my resurrection. Maybe I just wanted to show off to her. Maybe maybe maybe.
We woke up and I told her to get dressed in whatever she had that was closest to climbing gear.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” I said.
“I don’t want to find myself in a grave like you did,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Nothing’s going to hurt you when I’m around,” I said, which was less a promise and more a simple statement of fact.
“I’ve heard that before,” she said, but went behind the curtain to change anyway.
I took her to the mountain where I’d fought Gabriel. It would have been an impossible climb for her in the winter, but it was summer now, and most of the snow was melted, so it was just almost impossible. I pointed out the area where the cave was hidden to her before we started, high up the slope. She looked at the mountain for a long time.
“What’s up there?” she finally asked.
“These days, I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I imagine it’ll be something you want to photograph.”
She studied me for a moment. “This is where whatever happened to you happened to you, isn’t it?” she said.
“We should get moving before the day gets too hot,” I told her.
And so up we went the steep slope. She let me carry the camera for the first time. Fair enough. We only talked once on the way, when we paused on a ledge to drink from her canteen.
“What will you do if you ever find an angel?” I asked.
“I’m not looking for any angel,” she said. “I’m looking for a very specific angel.”
I studied her perched there on the ledge, the wind blowing her hair around her face. She didn’t look down at the way we’d come.
“Which angel?” I asked.<
br />
She squinted up at the sky.
“We should get moving before the day gets too hot,” she said.
She was an intriguing woman, Penelope.
And so onwards and upwards we went, until we reached the entrance of the cave. We hung to the side of the mountain a few feet under the opening, catching our breath. When I looked down at the thousand or so feet to the ground, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Penelope’s face was white, as were her hands holding onto the roots of some scrub tree that had once grown up here, but she was still with me.
I didn’t sense Gabriel inside the cave, so I wasn’t worried. Someday I’d learn to not be so overconfident. Someday.
I heaved myself up into the cave and then reached down for Penelope and pulled her in before some stray wind carried her off the side of the mountain. Only when she was safely inside did we look around.
It was more or less like I remembered it. The drawings in blood were still on the walls, and the cross made of bones was still in the back corner of the cave. The ice sculpture of the true face of Christ had melted, but my climbing axe lay on the floor of the cave where the sculpture had been.
Penelope stood in the cave entrance, staring. She didn’t even move for her camera, which I leaned against one of the walls.
“What is this place?” she asked.
I considered telling her the truth, that it was an angel’s lair. Or had once been an angel’s lair anyway. But then she’d want to know how I knew, and what I knew, and that would just lead to too many other awkward questions. So I just skipped that whole subject.
“I came across it climbing,” I said.
“Is there where you fell?” she asked.
“Close enough,” I said.
“It’s a long way from here to the graveyard where we met,” she said.
I reached down to pick up my climbing axe and buy some time while I considered how to answer that. As it turned out, there was no time to answer.
As soon as I picked up the axe, the bones of the cross all fell to the cave floor. For a second I thought maybe I had brushed against them and knocked them to the ground. Then they moved around on the floor, reassembling themselves into another shape. A giant man. Or, to be more accurate, a giant skeleton.
“Cross,” Penelope said from behind me, in a remarkably calm voice, all things considered. “What exactly is happening here?”
A trap, I wanted to tell her. I didn’t know if it was triggered by me specifically picking up the axe, or if it would have happened had anyone picked up the axe. But it didn’t matter now. The trap had been set, and I had sprung it. Like so many other traps I’d walked into in the past. Now the only thing to think about was how to survive it.
The skeleton stood up, and it towered over us. It wasn’t a human skeleton, but it was humanoid. It had a large skull and fangs, and long, bony talons. I had no idea what sort of creature it had once been.
“Is it a yeti?” Penelope asked.
Well, yes, that made sense. It could have been a yeti. Originally. Hell, maybe it had even been a sasquatch. But all that mattered was what it was now. And now, I was pretty sure, it was a golem. Animated no doubt by Gabriel to slow my pursuit. Which it set about doing.
It slashed out at me with those long talons, and I parried with the climbing axe like I was parrying a sword blow.
“I think we need to climb back down,” I told Penelope. “Now.”
Instead, she went for her camera, as the golem snapped at my head with its fangs. I batted it away with the axe, which didn’t seem to do much more than inconvenience it.
“This is not the time for photographs!” I yelled at Penelope.
“I can’t think of a better time for photographs!” she yelled back.
The golem didn’t say anything, just tried a one-two gouge and disembowel trick with its claws that kept me busy defending myself with the axe. I guess it was a small measure of mercy that Gabriel had left the axe so I at least had something to defend myself with. He always was a little too committed to honour and other forgotten ideals.
The problem with golems is there’s no real way to kill them. They’re pretty much indestructible until their power source runs out. But that could work to my advantage, because in this case I had a hunch what this golem’s power source was. It had been crafted by an angel, after all.
So I threw myself at it and buried the axe in its skull as hard as I could and released the grace trapped inside it. And as it spilled out I took it in.
And sprung the second trap.
The cave walls shook and then started to come apart. Rocks flew at me, bombarding me. I knew instantly what Gabriel had done. He hadn’t only breathed grace into the golem. He’d also breathed it into the walls of the cave itself. When I drew the grace from the golem, I also drew the grace out of the walls. And the cave collapsed upon us.
There was no time to shout at Penelope to run. There was no time for her to run anyway. There was no time for anything.
Except.
I used Gabriel’s grace from the golem to give myself the speed and power of an angel. I lunged over to Penelope’s side as the walls and ceiling of the cave came down and I pulled her into my arms. Then I threw us out the entrance as the mountain reclaimed the cave, burying the golem, and we fell into the sky.
Penelope screamed, but only for a few seconds. Because then I used the last of the grace I’d taken from the golem to sprout wings like an angel’s. I hated to do it, but Gabriel was in my mind, so it came naturally. We glided down toward the forest below.
Penelope wrapped her arms around me and stared at me. “You’re an angel,” she said.
“Not even close,” I said.
“What are you then?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said.
And then the last of Gabriel’s grace burned away too soon, and my wings melted away, and we were falling once more. I turned us in mid-air so I would take the brunt of the impact, and then we were crashing through the trees, and I figured that was it for that life.
And there was darkness for a time. And then there was light.
And I came to in the cabin in the woods. After I was done the usual thrashing about and such, I looked around and saw Penelope sitting on a stool beside the bed. She had a bandage wrapped around her forehead and there was another bandage on her arm. I could feel more bandages on all my limbs. She leaned forward and put her canteen to my lips.
“I imagine you need this more than I do,” she said.
I scratched at the beard on my face and estimated there was about a week’s growth there. I took the water and drank, then handed it back to her. She didn’t say anything else. Right. I was going to have to provide an explanation.
“I guess it was our turn to be favoured by fortune,” I said.
“It took more than fortune to save us from that fall,” she said. She looked at my shoulders, where my wings had been. “You were on the verge of death after,” she added. “Your injuries should have been too grave to recover from.” She peeled back some of the bandages wrapped around my chest. The skin underneath was pink with fresh scars.
“I didn’t bother with stitching you up,” Penelope added. “You healed too quickly on your own for me to make any difference.”
“It’s a long story,” I sighed.
She got up, and I thought maybe she was going to leave now that I was alive and well again. Just like all the other women that had left me over the years. Instead, she went to the cupboard and opened it. There was a last can of beans and a single bottle of wine left. She opened both and brought them to me.
“I ran out of everything yesterday,” she said. “I was going to have to leave you here when I went back for supplies. I was wondering whether I should bury you again or not.”
I gobbled down the beans and drank half the bottle of wine in one gulp. I thought about the fact she would have c
ome back for me. Then I sat up and stretched. I was still in the same clothes I’d been wearing when I died, but I could feel the air on my back from the rips where the wings had burst through my shirt.
“Sorry about your camera,” I said. “I’ll get you a new one.”
“Why don’t you tell me who you are and we’ll call it even,” she said.
I got up and wandered around the cabin, working out the kinks. I looked outside. It was a sunny afternoon. The birds were talking to each other and the spiders were eating things in their webs and the clouds continued to move overhead, uncaring.
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
Penelope didn’t say anything else, just waited.
So I told her. I told her who I was, or maybe more accurately what I was. I gave her the brief notes rather than the whole history, but I did tell her about Gabriel and what had happened in that cave. And then when I was done I waited for her to run away or call me mad or do any of the usual things any other mortal had done when I’d revealed the truth about myself.
She didn’t do any of the usual things. Instead, she took the wine from my hand and drank some herself. She studied me some more. And then she nodded.
“All right, that explains a lot,” she said.
I didn’t really know what to say to that, but I had a feeling an apology of some sort was in order.
“Sorry about almost getting you killed,” I managed. “I really did want to show you that angel’s lair.”
“We should join forces,” she said.
I shook my head. “I’m sure your spiritualist friends are all very interesting, curious people,” I said. “But I don’t want to get involved with them.”
“I meant you and me,” she said.
“What would we do together?” I asked.
“The same thing we do on our own,” she said. “Hunt angels.”
Really, how could I not fall for her?
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, GO TO AMERICA
I drove back to Dublin, thinking things over as I went.
This particular trip hadn’t exactly cleared things up for me. It may have even cost me my soul. I wasn’t sure on how such matters worked. And let’s not even talk about the child business for now.
