Time to put on her wedding gown.
He was whole again.
After so many centuries, it took him awhile to stand upright. When he finally could, he stretched his arms and his muscles, feeling them swell with life once more as he dragged the damp, dungeon air into his lungs. He looked around the tiny room that had held him captive and sneered at its ultimate uselessness, at its inability to contain the great thing that he was.
Voices filtered to his sensitive ears, moving through the primitive corridors, and he knew immediately what that meant. A tour, like the one that young woman had led. The first group of the day. Excellent.
He had taken many disguises during his existence as he’d passed from place to place. This would be the first of many more to come.
“I wish I could say I’ve never seen you so beautiful, love,” Robbie said in a low voice as everyone at the reception clapped madly and he led her to the table where the cake waited to be cut. “But you look just as rotten as I feel.”
“I could tell you’re sick, too,” she whispered back. “What’s wrong with us?”
He squeezed her hand. “Lousy cold, that’s all. Maybe bronchitis. The timing sucks, but what can you do?”
Jenelle managed to smile at him, then coughed into her hand, fighting to keep the brunt of it inside so no one would notice. Her chest still hurt. “Recuperate on the beach, that’s what. With margaritas and sunshine.”
“Great idea,” he agreed. He stepped into place beside her, and when she picked up the silver-coated cake server, he put his hand over hers. With forced smiles, they cut the first piece, then fed each other the requisite bite for the cameras. When that was finally done, she and Robbie made their way back to the head table, foregoing the dance floor in favor of watching dully as the celebration continued.
At the cake table, one black-clad waitress picked up the cake server and quickly cut the rest of the beautiful three-tiered cake into small, neat pieces, using her thumb and forefinger to push each one onto the plates so the other staff could distribute the slices among the rest of the guests.
He slipped into step behind the tour group as they passed the roped-off corridor leading to the room he was leaving behind. A couple of steps more and the woman in front of him turned, realizing suddenly that someone was behind her. She stumbled when she saw him and he took her bare hand to steady her, rubbing a part of himself into the soft skin by her thumb. She started to say something—“Thank you,” perhaps—but instead she shuddered and yanked her hand free before hurrying forward, afraid to her soul but not knowing why. He watched her go, hoping she was a visitor from a foreign land and would carry his gift far.
Mankind had taken to the skies in his absence, a realm once reserved only for him and his dark and light brethren. This would prove to be their undoing.
At the exit, as he saw his first daylight in far too long to remember, and a young man in a costume—really hardly more than a teenager—looked at him, then hurried over and blocked his path before he could leave. “Hey,” he said, “I don’t remember you at the entrance. You didn’t pay.”
He cleared his throat, letting his essence reach out and adapt to the current times before using his voice. “But I have no money,” he said.
The young man scowled. “I don’t know how you got past me,” he said, “but don’t you ever come back here again.”
Before the other man could pull out of range, he touched the teen ever-so-lightly on the cheek. “Not to worry,” he said gently. The smile he gave the costumed worker was a grotesque mask of black gums and bloody teeth.
“I won’t have to.”
SCENT OF THE GREEN CATHEDRAL
Jay Lake
YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW the way. There was a path, broad and brightly-lit at the first, seducing you through tangled thickets and along narrowing alleys between the boles until there was nothing left but the ache of your feet and a cathedral-green darkness all around you. The forest had become thick and treacherous, wolves in every shadow, brigands hidden in each tree.
Behind? You saw nothing. No evidence of your passage. No backward path. It was as if you had been born in this place, child of leaf and branch.
Before? Everything, leading nowhere. Just the forest’s endless sheltering shadow. It was as if you had come to die in this place, a rough beast who would slouch no further.
Then you saw the light, flickering among the branches, a star descending. Stories came to your mind, fairies of old, time stretched to taffy Under the Hill. You had never believed in them.
The light had wings, making a promise of the spark. It sailed toward you, path as smooth and sure as any river’s, to spin around your head until the very gleaming made you dizzy and you fell to the leafy loam.
“I am lost,” you croaked. “My way is gone.”
The wings spread wide then, golden pinions glowing with dawn’s rich light. Her face was beauty, a brilliant scarab frozen in the bubbling amber of God’s handiwork. Her body was a temple, desirable beyond lust. “There is always a way,” she said. “You only need ask.”
Your mouth opened, words on your tongue, breath caught in your throat, but the words would not come. Your lungs worked like bellows, creaking in your chest, but no air would move. The amber flowed from her to you, an examination by the lidless green eye of God.
Only those without sin could be saved. Only those with sin would desire salvation. To ask was error, silence a worse failing.
“I ...” you finally choked the word from your lips, the sound a fishbone gone wrong, but she had already departed.
You were left with only memories of golden light and her ivory-skinned glory. Newfound beads of amber in your fist, you stumbled around a corner into sunlight and traffic. The scent of the green cathedral has never left you.
SNOW ANGELS
Sarah Pinborough
SARAH PINBOROUGH is the author of six horror novels from Leisure Books. Her debut thriller, A Matter of Blood, was recently published by Gollancz, and is the first in The Dog-Faced Gods trilogy. She also has a young-adult novel, The Double-Edged Sword, out from the same imprint under the name “Sarah Silverwood.”
She was the winner of the 2009 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, the 2010 award for Best Novella and has been short-listed three times for Best Novel. She has also been short-listed for the World Fantasy Award and for the Shirley Jackson Award.
“The idea for ‘Snow Angels’ came about in the really cold snap of February 2009,” explains Pinborough, “when I was walking my mum’s dog for her down by the river.
“The paths were iced over and the grass was crisp and there was never anyone around because it was just too frozen and slippy, and the whole world seemed to have become simply magical shades of white and grey—the habitat of things that didn’t perhaps belong entirely with the rest of us.
“I’m a sunshine girl, though, so for me, anything that lived in the frozen wasteland was never going to be entirely friendly ...”
IT WAS FEBRUARY when the snow fell—the same day the nurses moved Will from his bed at the far end of the dormitory and into the smaller, private sanatorium on a different floor of The House. I was eleven years old. I hadn’t seen the sanatorium and I didn’t want to. No one that was taken from the bedrooms ever came back, and even as children we knew why. Death lived that way. Dying was, after all, the business of The House; it was what we’d gone there to do. None of us who were left watched as they took Will away. It was better to imagine that he’d never been there in the first place—just a vague shadow or shape, or a ghost of a boy who’d once lived.
The world outside the window had been smothered in grey for days and, as the temperature dropped, frost cracked across the glass and breathed its white onto the lawns where the nurses would let us go out and sit or play if we were feeling well enough and the weather was mild. Finally, as Will was ushered away to die somewhere “other,” stillness trickled through The House and thick white flakes drifted in clouds from the sky. Poor,
yellow, Will was forgotten in the glory of that sight.
According to Sam, who’d been considered something of a math and science prodigy before cancer had gripped him and squeezed his difference into a less acceptable shape, it hadn’t snowed in England for more than thirty years. Sam was fourteen and had been a broad and handsome boy with an easy grin when he first arrived. Now his glasses slid too often down his thin face, as if the tumor in his head was somehow hollowing out his cheeks as it ate up his clever brain.
“At least I think it hasn’t,” he said. Small frown lines furrowed across his forehead under his sandy hair. By the time the snow came I’d been at The House for more than a year and I’d stopped talking to Sam so much. His smile was too often lop-sided and his sentences drifted away unfinished or suddenly ended with a burst of expletives. It didn’t really matter whether he was right or wrong—although an idly curious check years later proved him right—what mattered was that none of us had seen such a thing beyond old photographs and films when we’d had our brief flirtations with normality, and been healthy and at school and had families that weren’t ashamed of us. In our short, dark and over-shadowed lives, the arriving snow was something of a gift. A miracle that changed the world into something new—something in which perhaps we belonged as much as everybody else.
There were twelve children in The House that day, and in both the girls’ and the boys’ dorm thin fingers clutched at the windowsills and wide eyes stared outside. Our breaths coated the glass with rotten steam as we watched, afraid that if we looked away for even a precious second the sky would suck the white treasure back.
We needn’t have worried. Over the next few days the cold snap showed no sign of relenting. More freezing snow was driven our way from the Arctic, carried on angry blasts of icy winds that howled across the stretches of water that divided the warm from the cold. The world had changed outside the window. Everything was white.
Even the nurses showed vague signs of humanity beneath their clinically efficient exteriors. They smiled without stopping themselves mid-expression and their eyes twinkled and cheeks flushed with the glow and excitement of the chill. Perhaps it gave them a small lift in the deathly monotony of the duty they had been given. The nurses shared The House with us, but we were two separate tribes and I’m not sure either really “saw” the other—the dying children and the healthy adults. Only when the snow came was there any sense that the blood that flowed through their veins was barely different to our own.
On the morning the nurses came to clear Will’s possessions away, I found Amelie in the playroom. She was kneeling on an old couch and peering out across its back through the chipped sash window. She looked thinner. Her large red sweater swallowed her tiny frame and my heart ached. My world had changed when Amelie arrived with her long, blonde hair and sharp blue eyes. Her laughter was infectious and alive, and even as she rapidly got sicker, that laugh never lost its vibrancy. Dying with Amelie made dying easier, even with the knowledge of the tears, the sleeping, the pain and the fear that came before the final move to the sanatorium. I loved Amelie Parker with the whole of my damaged being and, in all the years that have passed since. I don’t think that love has ever really let me go.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Her cheekbones cut lines through her skin as she smiled. “We should go outside.”
“To the garden?” I looked out at the sea of white and grey. It was cold and my back ached where my kidney was eating itself, but my feet itched to find out what the snow felt like beneath them.
“No,” she shook her head. “Past the garden. Lets go out and walk along the river and around the park.” Her eyes sparkled. “What do you think?”
“Yeah.” I grinned. “Let’s do it. Just us.”
“Of course just us.” She tossed her hair over one shoulder in a gesture that had first made my stomach flip two months earlier on the day she’d climbed out of the back of the ambulance. Now my stomach just tightened. The spun gold had slipped away over the intervening weeks and although she washed and brushed it every day she felt well enough, Amelie’s glory was now dull, lank and lifeless. Sometimes she would hold the ends and stare at it sadly, but mostly she smiled defiantly at the world, and I’m sure that in her mind her hair was always the color of the sun.
“Let’s do it.” She climbed down from the couch and took my hand. “While we still can.”
Her palm was dry, as if the skin was flaking away, and although I know that in that moment Amelie was simply referring to the fleeting life the snow and ice was likely to have rather than our own predicaments, those words still haunt me.
We were both sick—Amelie had spent the three days of the snowfall in bed with a hacking cough—but neither of us was in any hurry to die, and so we layered ourselves up in all the warm clothes we could muster. With our coats done up tight, we ventured outside. We weren’t the first to explore the snow, but I was the healthiest amongst the children and Amelie the most determined, and we were the first to go beyond the confines of the small garden and the safety of The House’s proximity.
We shuffled past the snowman Sam had attempted the day before. It was barely more than a ball of compact white, scarred with dirty streaks. The older boy had drifted back inside within ten minutes of being out, his mind confused and stabbing pains attacking his eyes. It wouldn’t be too long before Sam was headed to the sanatorium. He was becoming too erratic and unpredictable. He was nearly just another empty bed to haunt my dreams. Our numbers were dwindling, and by rights I should have had my turn in the sanatorium months before, but my body just kept on living despite the fire in my back.
Amelie coughed once, a long and loud sound that racked her chest, and then as her fragile lungs adjusted to the icy air we stepped through the small gate that separated our world from the one beyond. Somewhere behind us a nurse or two probably stared disapprovingly out of the windows, but none would come and fetch us back in. We were here to die. No one treated us; they just medicated our pain and waited. It didn’t matter much to that other tribe at The House whether we did our best to stay alive or otherwise.
We stood at the start of the path that wound a circuit along the river and around the field and simply stared. Before us was an ocean of white that met with grey on the horizon, the colors so similar that it was hard to see where the land ended and the sky began. I squinted against the harsh gleam that glared from the powdery surface and beside me Amelie lifted one hand to her forehead as if we truly were adventurers peering out over alien lands.
“Come on.” Her giggle cut into the empty silence, and we trudged carefully forward. The snow had compacted into ice and I could see echoes of the footprints that had beaten it down trapped like fossils in the glistening surface. The ice glittered and, as I looked, the more colors I could see hiding in its shards—purples and blues and pinks and hints at shades in-between. I sniffed, and so did Amelie. It was the only sound other than our crunching feet and the occasional twisting whistle of the wind. My ears stung with the cold, but my heart was lifted by the quiet.
With the ice in places too slick to keep our unsteady feet gripped, we slowly made our way to the edge of the field, arms held out slightly for balance, and then stepped onto the snow. Amelie gasped. Her face shone, and for a second it was almost as if she had a whole lifetime ahead of her.
“It’s so soft!”
My feet sunk through the cold white that crumpled beneath my weight, and I pulled my gloves off to slide my fingers into the wet surface. Beside me, Amelie crouched down, so that the hem of her coat was dipping into the snow, and scooped a small handful into her mouth. She grinned and poked her tongue out, and I watched the white dissolve into the hot pink before doing the same back.
We didn’t speak but giggled and gasped and held the almost-whole-almost-nothing substance in our fingers until our hands were red and raw. We didn’t play with it, or roll it into balls and throw it at each other. Those things didn’t come to mind as perhaps they would have with other children. May
be because it had been a long time since we’d run and laughed and played, and to do that again might break us from the inside out with the memories of all that was lost; or perhaps it was just because our bodies were too tired from the simple fight to stay alive. Whichever, we simply touched the snow and tasted it and smelled it. Our wide eyes drunk in the strange grey view as if it were something to be savored and stored safely away for reliving in the terrible days ahead.
In the distance a blot of darkness came through the gate from the far field and started on the slow walk around the path, a dog bounding ahead. Amelie stood up and we both smiled, willing the animal with its soft fur and wet tongue to come our way. The taller figure paused, and even from the hundreds of yards between us, I was sure I could see the person stiffen. A whistle sliced through the air, and the sheepdog immediately turned and headed back to its master. Together they disappeared back through the gate, as if even from this distance our diseases would somehow be catching. We watched them go and Amelie’s smile fell.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 11
