“It didn’t say anything. But I knew what it was.”
“You say you knew—but how? This is the point that I am trying to make to you.”
Gillie lowered her eyes. Her hands were resting in her lap and somehow they didn’t even look like hers. “The fact is I’m a nun.”
Dr. Vaudrey swung around to face her. “Did I hear what you said correctly? You are a nun!”
“In secret, yes.”
“An undercover nun, is that what you’re saying?”
Gillie nodded.
“May I ask to which order you belong?”
“It doesn’t have a name. It’s my own order. But I’ve given my life to God and the Blessed Virgin and to suffering humanity even if they’re drunk in doorways.”
Dr. Vaudrey slowly took off his spectacles and looked across his desk at her with infinite sympathy, even though her head was lowered and she couldn’t see him. “My dear young lady,” he said, “you have the most laudable aims in life; and it is not for me to say what you saw or what you didn’t see.”
“I saw an angel.”
Dr. Vaudrey swung himself around in the opposite direction. “Yes, my dear. I believe that you probably did.”
The young minister was waiting for her in the library. He was stocky, with thinning hair and fleshy ears, but she thought he was really quite good-looking for a minister. He wore a horrible sweater with reindeer leaping all round it and brown corduroy trousers.
“Sit down,” he said, indicating a dilapidated sofa covered with cracked red leather. “Would you care for some coffee? Or maybe some Irn Bru? Mind you I’m fairly sure the Irn Bru’s flat. They bought it in two Christmasses ago, and it’s been sitting in the sideboard ever since.”
Gillie sat pale and demure at the very far end of the sofa and gave the minister nothing more than a quick negative shake of her head.
He sat astride a wheelback chair and propped his arms across the top of it. “I can’t say that I blame you. The coffee’s no good, either.”
There was a long silence between them. The library clock ticked so wearily that Gillie kept expecting it to stop, although it didn’t.
“I suppose I ought to introduce myself,” said the young minister. “I’m Duncan Callander, but you can call me Duncan if you want. Most of my friends called me Doughnuts. You know—Duncan Doughnuts?”
Another long silence. Then Duncan said, “You’ve seen an angel, then? In the flesh so to speak?” Gillie nodded.
“This Doctor Vaudrey ... this psychiatrist ... he thinks that you’ve been suffering some stress. It’s partly due to your age, you see. Your mind and your body are going through some tremendous changes. It’s only natural to look for something more to believe in than your parents and your schoolteachers. With some girls it’s a pop group; with other girls it’s God. But Doctor Vaudrey thought your case was very interesting. He’s had girls with religious visions before. But none like yours. He said he could almost believe that you really saw what you said you saw.”
He took out his handkerchief and made an elaborate ritual out of wiping his nose. “That’s why he passed you onto your own minister, and why your own minister passed you onto me. I’m a bit of a specialist when it comes to visions.”
“I saw an angel,” Gillie repeated. She felt that she had to keep on saying it until they believed her. She would go on saying it for the rest of her life, if necessary. “It was helping Toby to walk.”
Duncan said, “It was six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, dazzling white, and you could just about make out its eyes and its mouth. It may have had wings but you’re not at all sure about that.”
Gillie turned around and stared at him. “How did you know that? I haven’t told that to anybody.”
“You didn’t have to. Yours is the twenty-eighth sighting since 1973, and every single one sounds exactly like yours.”
Gillie could hardly believe what she was hearing. “You mean—other people have seen them—as well as me?”
Duncan reached out and took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “Many other people, apart from you. It’s not at all uncommon. The only uncommon thing about your seeing an angel is that you’re just an ordinary girl, if you can forgive me for saying so. Most of the other manifestations have come to deeply religious people, ministers and missionaries and such, people who have devoted all of their life to their church.”
“I have, too,” Gillie whispered.
Duncan gave her an encouraging smile. “You have, too?”
“I took holy orders.”
“Where did you do this? At St. Agnes?”
Gillie shook her head. “In my bedroom.”
Duncan laid his hand on her shoulder. “Then you’re a very exceptional novice indeed. And you must be pure of heart, and filled with love, or else you couldn’t have seen what you saw.”
“Are angels dangerous?” asked Gillie. “Toby won’t get hurt, will he?”
“Quite the opposite, as far as I know. In all of the sightings of angels that I’ve read about, they’ve been protecting people, particularly children. We don’t really know for sure whether they come from Heaven, or whether they’re some kind of visible energy that comes out of the human mind. All kinds of people have been trying to prove their existence for years. Physicists, bishops, spiritualists ... you name them. Just think what a spectacular boost it would be if the Church could prove that they were real, and that they had been sent by God!”
He reached across his desk and picked up a book with several marked pages in it. “You see these pictures? This is the closest that anybody has ever come to proving that angels exist. For forty years, pediatric studies of babies taking their first steps have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that they are technically in defiance of all the laws of physics when they begin to toddle. They don’t have the physical strength, they don’t have the balance. And yet—miraculously—they do it.
“In 1973 a team of doctors set up an experiment at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, in America, using children who were just on the verge of walking. They took ultraviolet and infra-red photographs ... and here, you can see the results. In at least five of these pictures, there’s a tall shadowy shape which appears to be holding the toddler’s hands.”
Gillie studied them closely, with a prickling feeling down her back, as if centipedes were crawling inside her jumper. The shapes were very dim, and their eyes were barely visible. But they were just the same as the dazzling figure who had visited Toby’s bedroom.
“Why hasn’t anybody said anything about this before?” she asked. “If there have been twenty-seven other sightings, apart from mine, why hasn’t anybody said so?”
Duncan closed the book. “Church politics. The Roman Catholics didn’t want the sightings mentioned in case they prove not to be angels, after all, but simply some sort of human aura. And the Church of Scotland didn’t want them mentioned because they frown on miracles and superstition and hocus-pocus. Nobody said anything because they were all monks or nuns or ordained clergy, and they were under strict instructions from their superiors to keep their visions to themselves.”
“But I’m not a real nun! I could say something about it, and nobody could stop me!”
Duncan said, “First of all I have to speak to the kirk elders, to see what they think about it. After all, if a statement is made to the effect that one of our parishioners has witnessed an angel, then the church is going to be closely involved in all of the publicity that’s bound to follow.”
“You do believe me, though, don’t you?” said Gillie. “I’m not mad or anything. I really saw it and it was really there.”
“I believe you,” smiled Duncan. “I’ll talk to the elders tomorrow, and then I’ll come around to your house and tell you what they’ve decided to do.”
That evening, while they were having supper at the kitchen table, lamb chops and mashed neeps, little Toby came wobble-staggering across the floor and clung to the edge of Gillie’s chair. He looked up at her and c
ooed.
“Go away, cuckoo,” she told him. “You’ll have your Marmitey fingers all over my skirt.” For a split-second, she thought she saw his eyes flash—actually flash—like somebody taking a photograph.
You’d better watch what you say, Alice warned her. Toby’s got a guardian angel, and you don’t want to go upsetting him.
A weak sun was shining through the dishrag clouds when Duncan Callander came to call the next afternoon. He sat in the best room and mum gave him a cup of tea and a plateful of petticoat tails.
“I talked to the kirk elders this morning. We had a special meeting, in fact. I want to tell you that they all extend their warmest best wishes to young Gillie here, and that they very much appreciate her bringing such a delightful story to their attention.”
“But it’s not a story!” Gillie interrupted.
Duncan raised his hand to silence her. He didn’t look her in the eye. He looked instead at the pattern on the carpet and spoke as if he had learned his words from a typewritten sheet of paper.
“As I say, they were very appreciative, and very amused. But they find that there is no evidence at all that what Gillie saw was anything more than an optical illusion; or a delusion brought on by the stress of having a new baby in the household. In other words, the most likely explanation is a little show of harmless attention seeking by an older sister who feels jealous and displaced.”
Gillie stared at him. “You said you believed me,” she whispered. “You said you believed me.”
“Well, yes, I’m afraid that I did, but it was wrong of me. I have a rather mystical turn of mind, I’m afraid, and it’s always getting me into hot water. The kirk elders—well, the kirk elders pointed out that nobody has ever produced any conclusive proof that angels actually exist, and until that happens the kirk’s official line is that they do not.”
He took a breath. “I apologize if I misled you.”
“And that’s all?” Gillie demanded. “That’s all that’s going to happen? I saw an angel and you’re going to say that I was making it up because I was jealous of Toby?”
“If you want to put it that way, yes,” Duncan told her, although he spoke so soft and ashamed that she could hardly hear him.
Mum took hold of Gillie’s hand and squeezed it. “Come on, sweetie. You can forget it all now; put it behind you. Why don’t I bake you your favorite cake tonight?”
Where are you going to sleep? asked Alice.
“I don’t know. I’ll find somewhere. Tramps have to.”
You’re not going to sleep in a doorway on a freezing-cold night like this?
“I’ll find a squat. Anywhere’s better than home.”
Your supper’s waiting on you. Mum baked that rich thick chocolate cake. Your warm bed’s all turned down.
“I don’t care. What’s the point of cakes and warm beds if people say you’re a liar. Even that minister said I was liar, and who was the one who was doing the lying?”
She had trudged the whole length of Rose Street, between brightly-lit pubs and Indian restaurants, jostled by rowdy teenagers and cackling drunks. Maybe Mrs. McPhail would have her for the night. Mrs. McPhail believed in angels.
By the time she had crossed Princes Street and started the long walk up Waverley Bridge, it had started to snow again. Sir Walter Scott watched her from his Gothic monument as if he understood her predicament. His head, too, had been full of fancies. She was wearing her red duffle coat and her white woolly hat, but all the same she was beginning to feel freezing cold, and her toes had already turned numb.
At the top of the hill the streets were almost deserted. She crossed North Bridge Street but she decided to walk down the back streets to Mrs. McPhail’s in case Dad was out looking for her in the car.
She had never felt so desolate in her life. She had known that people would find it difficult to believe her. She hadn’t minded that. What had hurt so much was Duncan’s betrayal. She couldn’t believe that adults could be so cynical—especially an adult whose chosen calling was to uphold truth and righteousness and protect the weak.
She was halfway down Blackfriars Street when she saw a young man walking very quickly toward her. He was wearing a tam and an anorak and a long Rangers scarf. He was coming toward her so fast that she wondered if somebody were chasing him. His face was wreathed in clouds of cold breath.
She tried to step to one side, but instead of passing her he knocked her with his shoulder, so that she fell back against a garden wall.
“What did you do that for?” she squealed at him; but immediately he seized hold of the toggles of her duffle coat and dragged her close to him. In the streetlight she could see that he was foxy-faced and unshaven, with a gold hoop earring in each ear, and skin the color of candle wax.
“Give us your purse!” he demanded.
“I can’t!”
“What d’you mean you can’t? You have to.”
“I’m running away. I’ve only got six pounds.”
“Six pound’ll do me. You can always run away again tomorrow. I don’t even have anywhere to run away from.”
“No!” screamed Gillie, and tried to twist away from him. But he clung onto her duffle coat and wrenched her from side to side.
“Out with your purse or it’ll be the worse for you, bonny lass!”
“Please,” she swallowed. “Please let me go.”
“Then let’s have your purse and let’s have it quick.”
His face was so close to hers that she could smell the stale tobacco on his breath. His eyes were glassy and staring. She reached into her pocket, took out her furry Scottie-dog purse and handed it to him. He glanced down at it in disdain.
“What’s this? A dead rat?”
“It’s my p-p-p—”
He thrust the purse into his pocket. “Trying to make me look stupid, is it? Well, how about a little souvenir to make you look even stupider?”
He dragged off her woolly hat, seized hold of her hair, and wrenched her from side to side. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t struggle. All she could do was gag with fear.
But it was then that she felt the pavement vibrating beneath her feet. Vibrating, as if a heavy road-roller were driving past. She heard a deep rumbling noise, that rapidly grew louder and louder, until she was almost deafened. The young man let go of her hair and looked around in alarm.
“What in the name of—” he began. But his words were drowned out by a thunderous blast of sound, and then a dazzling burst of white light. Right in front of them, a tall incandescent figure appeared, crackling with power, a figure with a crown of sizzling static and immense widespread wings.
It was so bright that the entire street was lit up, as if it were daylight. The falling snow fizzed and evaporated against its wings. Gillie stayed with her back to the garden wall, staring at it in disbelief. The young man stood staring at it, too, paralyzed with fear.
The wings flared even wider, and then the figure reached out with one long arm, and laid its hand on top of the young man’s hand, as if it were blessing him, or confirming him.
There was a sharp crack which echoed from one side of the street to the other. The young man screamed once; and then smoke started to pour out of his mouth and his nose; and he exploded. Fragments of tattered anorak were strewn all over the pavement, along with smoking ashes and dismembered shoes.
Almost immediately, the figure began to dim. It folded its wings, turned and vanished into the snow, as quickly and completely as if it walked through a door. Gillie was left with nothing but the young man’s scattered remains and an empty street, although she could see that curtains were being pulled back, and people were starting to look out of their windows to see what had happened.
She picked up her purse. Next to it, there were six or seven white feathers—huge and soft and fluffy as snow, although some of them were slightly scorched. She picked those up, too, and started to walk quickly back toward North Bridge Street, and then to run. By the time she heard the fire engines she was
well on her way home.
She pushed Toby through the kirkyard gate and up between the snow-topped gravestones. Duncan was standing in the porch, pinning up some notices. He gave her an odd look as she approached, although he didn’t turn away.
“What have you come for?” he asked her. “An explanation, or an apology? You can have both if you like.”
“I don’t need either,” she said. “I know what I saw was true and I don’t need to tell anybody else about it. I know something else, too. Everybody has a guardian angel of their own, especially the young, because everybody has to do something impossible, now and again, like learning to walk, or learning that your parents do care about you, after all.”
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 21
