Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts

by Stephen Jones (ed)

  Until she saw the shadow.

  “Look at that,” Jenelle said, pointing to the back wall. “I saw it this morning. It’s amazing that I didn’t catch it before.”

  They were sitting in a newly opened chamber off one of the main torture rooms. This one had been discovered a couple of months ago when a maintenance worker went to patch a crack in the mortar and found a number of the stones loose; it turned out to be a false wall, although the area beyond it was only six feet deep and empty. There was nothing in it now, but Jenelle was sure that some fun and gruesome exhibit would be erected soon enough.

  Robbie peered past her pointing finger. “I don’t see anything.” Her fiancé—even though they were only two weeks away from their wedding, it still felt amazing to call him that—looked forlornly back at the slightly smashed sandwich on his lap. This morning it had been peanut butter and slices of banana, something he’d seen on television and decided to try because it had been Elvis Presley’s favorite. After a morning in his bag, now it looked vaguely like wet wallpaper paste.

  “Here,” she said. She pulled the unwrapped plastic package off his knee and replaced it with her lunch bag. “Apple, cheese, crackers, a bag of crisps. If you’re sweet to me, I’ll buy you a chocolate bar.”

  Robbie squinted at her. “You’d eat this mess?”

  “Only for you.” To prove it, she unwrapped an edge and bit into the gooey sandwich. It was actually pretty good. “Now back to that shadow on the wall.”

  “I don’t see it,” he said again. “It’s just a wall.”

  Jenelle levered herself to her feet, glad to be up and off the drafty stone floor. No matter how heavy the blanket they used, it never seemed to do any good. “Look here.” She drew the tip of her finger in a pattern from top to bottom on the left. “This is a profile of sorts. “And here—” She did it again, this time in a sort of jagged pattern on the right side. The temporary low-light bulb strung overhead gave her arm its own sweeping blackness. “This looks like a wing.”

  He studied the wall, but she could tell by his face that it wasn’t there for him. “It must be your artistic eye,” he said. “It’s like cloud-watching. You always spot the coolest things and I just see ... clouds.”

  Jenelle didn’t say anything else as Robbie changed the subject, talking about the people in the marketing office and some big project he had coming up. Normally she would have been interested in everything he said, but today she just couldn’t focus on his words. Her gaze kept going back to that shadow, the one he couldn’t see but which seemed so clear to her that it looked ready to tear itself from the stones. He was right, of course—she’d studied painting in all mediums, drawing, sculpting, and all of that had taught her to look for the details, the story behind the obvious. And on that back wall, to her, was definitely something worth more study.

  One of the barriers has been broken down, and he can sense the presence of humans. They scurry back and forth like insects, carving and moving and cleaning, talking to each other in excited voices about their discovery and what it might mean. He can hear the voices clearly, but he understands so much more than that—their wants, their fears, their most inner secrets. Their enthusiasm over the ruptured wall, the potential for greed—these humans, they never change.

  The work progresses and they ask each other if this will ultimately lead to a passageway to a secret chamber, a room in which someone in the castle’s dark and bloody history hid treasures beyond imagining. Will what they eventually expose be worth all their effort, or will it be for nothing more than ancient, empty air?

  But air is never empty.

  Jenelle could swear that the shadow was getting darker, more ... intense. She’d checked it out every day since the room had been opened to employees and she and Robbie had lunched in it that first time. He hadn’t wanted to come back, and she couldn’t blame him. She wasn’t supposed to eat in the public cafeteria in costume and the employee break room was all the way across the grounds; at least in the courtroom, they could take their breaks between tours and sit on the benches instead of the floor. Today he’d been too busy to meet her for the midday meal, so she stood in the tiny alcove by herself, chewing on her apple and thinking that the area on the wall no longer seemed so much a shadow as an actual image.

  And yes. She was certain that was the edge of a wing on the right side.

  “So what exactly were you?” she murmured. “A painting? Or should I say, what are you?” Jenelle started to trace the edge on the left, where it almost looked like the contour of a face, then paused. Was the stone warm to the touch? No ... yes. She was sure of it. Even so, she glanced over her shoulder self-consciously then leaned forward and pressed her face against the wall. It was always cold in the dungeon, but today more so than usual because of a bitter, early fall rainstorm; because her skin was still chilled from being outside, the deep warm surface of the rock shocked her so much that she jerked backwards, lost her footing and fell.

  In his memories, the darkness is dissected by the flicker of flames from the torches and the glowing braziers. The single, tiny fireplace recessed into the far wall serves as nothing more than a space for him to heat a few more implements—it gives no warmth to the room or to his many, many victims, and he certainly shares none of his own eternal heat. Comfort comes to him not from the fire’s non-existent cheer but from the screams of those who writhe beneath the clamps and the claw and the hook, from the sweet, heavy smell of decay and the sticky thickness of blood on the tongue.

  He can’t wait to bathe in that scent, and so many others, yet again.

  “It’ll be fine,” Jenelle said. “It’ll just look like part of the make-up.”

  Robbie squinted at the knot on her forehead. It was the size of a robin’s egg, purple and bluish-grey, with a nasty split in the middle that had still been weeping blood ten minutes after she came to on the dirty, cold floor of the dungeon. Her head had throbbed for the rest of the afternoon and she’d felt feverish with the pain, wincing every time the edge of her purple jester’s hat scraped the upper part of the lump. To really top off her afternoon, when she’d opened her eyes after her tumble, she’d had dirt in her mouth and a damned rat—a rat, for God’s sake—had been mere inches from her face. She’d reported it to maintenance, but even so, every time she thought of that creature, she started to itch and get sick to her stomach.

  “I think you ought to see a doctor,” he said. “It looks infected.”

  Jenelle pushed his hand away and leaned closer to the mirror, checking out the freshly washed wound. “Don’t be silly. It only happened a couple of hours ago and we’ve disinfected it. It’ll be gone by the day after tomorrow.”

  When she backed away from the sink, Robbie followed her out of the bathroom. “Maybe I should stay the night. They say people with head injuries should be monitored for twenty-four hours.”

  “No way. We agreed, remember? Old-fashioned for the final week before the wedding. No sleeping in the same bed. No exceptions.”

  “But your head—”

  “I wasn’t knocked out,” she lied. “Time for you to head home.”

  He hesitated and Jenelle saw on his face that he really was concerned about her rather than just horny. “All right. But you call me if you don’t feel well, or if you get a headache.”

  “Of course.” To mollify him, she stepped close and put her arms around him. After a moment, he returned her hug, but gingerly. “I’m fine,” she repeated. To prove it, she lifted her face and pressed her lips against his, slipping the tip of her tongue into his mouth when he still held back. She felt him respond and let him pull her closer, ignoring the sting from the sore place on her forehead when it bumped lightly against his eyebrow. As the kiss intensified, she finally had to push him away. “Huh-uh,” she said. Then, “Oh, for crying out loud. I’ve gotten blood on you. Wait a sec.”

  Robbie swiped at the droplets, effectively smearing red down the side of his eye socket as he tried to rub it away. “You’re making i
t worse,” Jenelle said as she came back with a tissue.

  He took it from her and rubbed at his face. “Did I get it all?”

  She shook her head. “You need a mirror.”

  “Nah. I need to get out of here before I jump you.” He grinned, spit on the tissue and daubed again. “Now?”

  “You’ve pushed it into the corner of your eye, silly.”

  He wadded up the dirty tissue and shoved it in his pocket. “I’m going home and take a cold shower, then go over my presentation. Big meeting tomorrow with some investors from America.” He touched her briefly on the cheek, then he was out the door.

  Jenelle’s smile faded as she turned the lock. She’d never lied to Robbie about anything, but according to her watch, she’d definitely lost consciousness in the dungeon for almost a quarter of an hour. Why now?

  “Because I don’t want to screw everything up,” she said out loud. She went to the spare bedroom—the one that would be turned into Robbie’s office when he moved in—and pulled open the closet door, then just stood there and gazed at her wedding dress for a couple of minutes. That was the crux of it, all right. The wedding was Saturday, only three days away; and tomorrow was her last day of work until she and Robbie returned from their honeymoon. There were treasured friends and relatives from both sides coming in from all over the world—one guy, someone she’d never met, had been in the military with Robbie and was flying in from China. Her parents were coming from Canada, Robbie’s birth father from Australia, on and on. How could she dare put even a wrinkle in all these plans just because of a stupid, crazy fall in the dungeon?

  Jenelle closed the door and went back into the bathroom, digging in the medicine cabinet until she found some aspirin and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. She swallowed three of the chalky tablets, followed it with a couple of swigs of the pink liquid, then went to sit in the living room. She’d decorated it so carefully, in muted blue and white—the colors of the Wedgwood china that her mother so loved. Along with the rest of her flat, it was just the way she wanted it, the perfect little place for her and her husband to start their lives together.

  She turned off the lights when they began to hurt her eyes.

  Soon.

  The centuries of darkness and isolation had weakened him further and forced his essence to withdraw, first into his thoughts, then into his own battered form, and finally into the very walls of the castle itself. The stone welcomed him, became his cold and cruel confidant. He felt its coarse surface, the uneven bite of its ragged edges; he welcomed the sensation and caressed the stones like a deathless lover, finding not a single opening through which escape might be accomplished. Even the rats, those chittering, filthy purveyors of his gifts, could not reach him.

  But finally, a fracture in the wall that separated his chamber from the castle proper. A loose stone that invited investigation, the tearing down of a barrier that no one, nearly a thousand years later, knew should never be breached.

  Then came the woman. So young, so beautiful, so artistic and curious. She could see the shroud, just that, of what he had once been, and she had been drawn to it, drawn to him.

  Inexorably pulled by his heat as it revitalized, the same hellfire that she couldn’t resist touching. She’d had to get close to it, more than just fingertips. Human flesh against his stone façade, in exactly the way he needed. And he had thanked her, in his own very special way.

  The last tour of the day turned out to be a group of kids on a history field trip. They were from some private and moneyed school in London, and Jenelle could tell by their expensive uniforms, iPods and attitude that they were going to be noisy and hard to control, and that their two chaperones were concerned only that they didn’t tick any of them off so badly they’d complain to Mummy and Daddy. There were enough diamond earrings, glittering rings and pricey watches that the parents were probably lawyers, doctors and stockbrokers with the same kind of global connections as the people Robbie was even now sitting down with at his meeting.

  One more day of this, she told herself. Only a matter of hours. She gave them her introductory spiel and threw in plenty of macabre giggling and as many personalized quips as she could think of, but she wasn’t at the top of her game. She felt like hell, but this went way beyond the lousy headache that, were it a living thing, was surely doing nothing but sneering at the puny aspirins she kept taking. At least she’d been right about the lump looking like part of the makeup. Every now and then the tip of it, where she’d actually split the skin, would leak a drop of thin, reddish liquid. That was disgusting, but not a huge problem here—she was supposed to look like she had the plague—but she was going to have to bandage it tightly beneath her headdress and veil on Saturday. Surely by then she’d feel better and this damned headache would dissipate.

  “Step this way, my pretties,” she wheedled. Her own voice felt like a spike digging through the pain in her skull. “Mind your heads, now. We wouldn’t want them to be damaged before the torturers have their chance!” Some of them grinned nervously at her high-pitched laugh while the rest barely noticed her. All this effort to speak around an odd heaviness in her chest, and for what? To stand in an ancient corridor that was chilling her to her very bones as she tried to entertain these unappreciative teenagers.

  Jenelle grimaced, then turned that into a twisted smile that ended in a cough, another one she couldn’t cover because it would be out of role for her character. Damn it—something down here was irritating her throat, making her cough every few seconds. Mortar dust, probably, kicked up by the never-ending work on the castle’s interior walls. Another fifteen minutes and she’d be done with this group; after that, she could change out of this scratchy costume and dump the painful jester’s hat, and forget about it all for a little over two weeks. Her wedding was the day after tomorrow, her Mum and Dad would arrive tomorrow afternoon to help her get ready, and her life—her entire world—was on the verge of changing.

  She couldn’t wait.

  In the small dungeon room, in the early morning hours, he was almost complete again. Almost strong enough to pull free of the stone bonds that had held him for so very, very long.

  The dark energy that he needed to reshape himself had always existed, but his imprisonment in this man-made structure had severed his ties to it and left him unable to nourish and love it. Like an infant wrenched from its mother and abandoned, after a time it had finally perished.

  But like him, it would never truly die. It gained strength from him, and he from it.

  And together again, they would flourish.

  “Can I help you in there, dear?”

  Jenelle clutched at the edge of the sink for an overlong moment before she finally found her voice. “No, Mum—I’m fine. Just a case of nerves, that’s all.”

  “How about a cup of tea, then? It will help calm you.”

  “Sure,” she said automatically. “That would be nice.” Her mother had barely moved away from the other side of the door before Jenelle coughed again. When she looked down at her palm, there were tiny droplets of blood in it. “What the hell,” she said. A sinus infection? More like pneumonia—she felt like something huge and painful had taken up residence in her lungs. She flinched when her mother knocked on the door again.

  “Tea’s on, just a few minutes. You only have an hour before we have to leave for the church. Are you sure I can’t help?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’m almost ready to put on the dress.”

  The dress—her wedding dress. For God’s sake, of all the times to feel like crap, why her wedding day? She bent and rinsed her mouth and hands, then wiped at the splatters on the sink with a tissue. She tried to smile at her image but she looked ghastly; despite her well-learned skills with make-up, her skin was chalk-pale and she’d been unable to wipe out the blue shadows beneath her eyes. Her chest felt sore, and she had a painful lump beneath one arm. The horrid knot on her forehead was still there, too, but at least she’d been able to seal the split flesh with super glue and cover
it tightly with a small, clean bandage. The headdress on her veil would hide it. In the meantime, she opened the medicine cabinet and found the aspirin bottle. These would help—they had to, just long enough to get her through the ceremony and a couple of hours at the reception. Then, when she and Robbie could finally slip away in their limousine, she’d tell him she needed to see a doctor instead, have an exam and get some medication before they left for Hawaii in the morning.

  Jenelle drew her breath in and fought off another cough as she stood up straight. They were expecting over a hundred people at the wedding, and half again that at the reception. She could get through this. She had to.