One little cherub did something very bad-tempered with the radio aerial. Another little cherub punched an identical brother in the face in a dispute over the rear-view mirror. They scampered all over the car, but there was no way in. It all reminded Harry of monkeys at a safari park. He’d never taken Esther to a safari park. He never would now. “Daddy Daddy,” said the sat nav. “Daddy Daddy,” it kept on saying, emotionless, even cold—and the little children danced merrily outside.
“Oh, aren’t they beautiful!” cooed Esther. She reached for the door. “Shall we let them in?”
“Please,” said Harry. “Please. Don’t.”
“No. All right.” And she closed her eyes again. “Just leaves more for me,” she said.
For the first few days he was very hungry. Then one day he found he wasn’t hungry at all. He doubted that was a good thing.
He understood that the cherubs were hungry, too. Most of them had flown away, they’d decided that they weren’t going to get into this particular sardine tin—but there were always one or two about, tapping away, ever more forlorn. Once in a while a cherub would turn to Harry, and pull its most innocent face, eyes all wide and Disney-dewed, it’d look so sad. It’d beg, it’d rub its naked belly with its baby fingers, and it’d cry. “Daddy,” the sat nav would say at such moments. But however winning their performance, the cherubs still looked fat and oily, and their puffy cheeks were glowing.
Harry supposed they probably were starving to death. But not before he would.
One day Harry woke up to find Esther was on top of him. “Good morning,” she said to him, brightly. It should have been agony she was there, but she was as light as air, as light as a feather.
Her face was so very close to his, it was her hot breath that had roused him. Now unfurled, the wings stretched the breadth of the entire car. Her halo was grazing the roof. The wings twitched a little as she smiled down at him and bared her teeth.
“I love you,” she said.
“I know you do.”
“I want you to know that.”
“I do know it.”
“Do you love me, too?”
“Yes,” he said.
And she brought that head towards his—that now spherical head, he could still recognize Esther in the features, but this was probably Esther as a child, as a darling baby girl—she brought down that head, and he couldn’t move from it, she could do whatever she wanted. She opened her mouth. She kissed the tip of his nose.
She sighed. “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“All the things we could have done together,” she said. “All the places we could have been. Where would we have gone, darling?”
“I was thinking of Venice,” said Harry. “We’d probably have gone back there one day.”
“Yes,” said Esther doubtfully.
“And we never saw Paris. Paris is lovely. We could have gone up the Eiffel Tower. And that’s just Europe. We could have gone to America, too.”
“I didn’t need to go anywhere,” Esther told him. “You know that, don’t you? I’d have been just as happy at home, so long as you were there with me.”
“I know,” he said.
“There’s so much I wanted to share with you,” she said. “My whole life. My whole life. When I was working at the shop, if anything funny happened during the day, I’d store it up to tell you. I’d just think, I can share that now. Share it with my hubby. And we’ve been robbed. We were given one year. Just one year. And I wanted forever.”
“Safari parks,” remembered Harry.
“What?”
“We never did a safari park, either.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
Her eyes watered, they were all wide and Disney-dewed. “I want you to remember me the right way,” she said. “Not covered with blood. Not mangled in a car crash. Remember me the way I was. Funny, I hope. Full of life. I don’t want you to spoil the memory.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to move on. Live your life without me. Have the courage to do that.”
“Yes. You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
She didn’t deny it. “All the things we could have done together. All the children we could have had.” And she gestured towards the single cherub now bobbing weakly against the window. “All the children.”
“Our children,” said Harry.
“Heaven is filled with our unborn children,” said Esther. “Yours and mine. Yours and mine. Darling. Didn’t you know that?” And her wings quivered at the thought.
She bent her head towards him again—but not yet, still not yet, another kiss, that’s all, a loving kiss. “It won’t be so bad,” she said. “I promise. It itches at first, it itches like hell. But it stops. And then you’ll be as light as air. As light as feathers.”
She folded her wings with a tight snap. “I’m still getting used to that,” she smiled. And she climbed off him, and sprawled back in her seat. The neck twisted, the limbs every which way—really, so ungainly. And she went to sleep. She’d taken to sleeping with her eyes open. Harry really wished she wouldn’t, it gave him the creeps.
Another set of tappings at the window. Harry looked around in irritation. There was the last cherub. Mewling at him, rubbing his belly. Harry liked to think it was the same cherub that he’d first seen, that it had been loyal to him somehow. But of course, there was really no way to tell. Tapping again, begging. So hungry. “Daddy,” said the sat nav.
“My son,” said Harry.
“Daddy.”
“My son.”
Harry wound down the window a little way. And immediately the little boy got excited, started scrabbling through the gap with his fingers. “Just a minute,” said Harry, and he laughed even—and he gave the handle another turn, and the effort made him wince with the pain, but what was that, he was used to that. “Easy does it,” he said to the hungry child. “Easy does it.” And he stuck his hand out of the car.
The first instinct of his baby son was not to bite, it was to nuzzle. It rubbed its face against Harry’s hand, and it even purred, it was something like a purr. It was a good five seconds at least before it sank its fangs into flesh.
And then Harry had his hand around its throat. The cherub gave a little gulp of surprise. “Daddy?” asked the sat nav. It blinked with astonishment, just as it had echoed Harry’s own expressions when they’d first met, and Harry thought, I taught him that, I taught my little boy. And he squeezed hard. The fat little cheeks bulged even fatter, it looked as if the whole head was now a balloon about to pop. And then he pulled that little child to him as fast as he could—banging his head against the glass, thump, thump, thump, and the pain in his arm was appalling, but that was good, he liked the pain, he wanted it—thump one more time, and there was a crack, something broke, and the sat nav said “Daddy,” so calm, so matter-of-fact—and then never spoke again.
He wound the window down further. He pulled in his broken baby boy.
He discovered that its entire back was covered with the same feathers that made up the wings. So for the next half-hour he had to pluck it.
The first bite was the hardest. Then it all got a lot easier.
“Darling,” he said to Esther, but she wouldn’t wake up. “Darling, I’ve got dinner for you.” He hated the way she slept with her eyes open, just staring out sightless like that. And it wasn’t her face any more, it was the face of a cherub, of their dead son. “Please, you must eat this,” he said, and put a little of the creamy white meat between her lips; it just fell out on to her chin. “Please,” he said again, and this time it worked, it stayed in, she didn’t wake up, but it stayed in, she was eating, that was the main thing.
He kissed her then, on the lips. And he tasted what would have been. And yes, they would have gone to a safari park, and no, they wouldn’t have gone back to Venice, she’d have talked him out of it, but yes, America would have been all right.
And yes, they would have had rows, real rows, once in a while, but that would have been okay, the marriage would have survived, it would all have been okay. And yes, children, yes.
When he pulled his lips from hers she’d been given her old face back. He was so relieved he felt like crying. Then he realized he already was.
The meat had revived him. Raw as it was, it was the best he had ever tasted. He could do anything. Nothing could stop him now.
He forced his legs free from under the dashboard, it hurt a lot. And then he undid his seat belt, and that hurt, too. He climbed his way to Esther’s door, he had to climb over Esther. “Sorry, darling,” he said, as he accidentally kicked her head. He opened the door. He fell outside. He took in breaths of air.
“I’m not leaving you,” he said to Esther. “I can see the life we’re going to have together.” And yes, her head was on a bit funny, but he could live with that. And she had wings, but he could pluck them. He could pluck them as he had his son’s.
He probably had some broken bones, he’d have to find out. So he shouldn’t have been able to pick up his wife in his arms. But her wings helped, she was so light.
And it was carrying Esther that he made his way up the embankment, up through the bushes and brambles, up towards the road. And it was easy, it was as if he were floating—he was with the woman he loved, and he always would be, he’d never let her go, and she was so light, she was as light as feathers, she was as light as air.
MOLLY AND THE ANGEL
Brian Stableford
BRIAN STABLEFORD taught sociology for twelve years at the University of Reading before becoming a full-time writer in 1988. He has published more than 100 books, including over sixty novels, sixteen collections, seven anthologies and thirty nonfiction titles.
His recent novels include Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations and Prelude to Eternity. He has also completed a five-volume set of translations of the “scientific marvel fiction” of Maurice Renard, and a six-volume set of the scientific romances of J.H. Rosny the elder.
Stableford was the recipient of the 1999 Science Fiction
Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for contributions to science fiction scholarship, and he has also been presented with the SFRA’s Pioneer Award (1996), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987) and the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987).
“‘Molly and the Angel’ was the first of a series of seven sequels to ‘When Molly Met Elvis,’” explains the author, “which I hoped to publish in Interzone in the run-up to the Millennium. However, the editor abandoned the series after one more story, without bothering to tell me until the whole set was written, prompting me to cancel my subscription and never read the magazine again. There were no angels involved.”
THE FIRST TIME MOLLY SAW THE ANGEL he was standing in the middle of the pedestrianized precinct at the end of Stockwell Road. There was no mistaking what he was. He had wings like a great white eagle, whose pinion feathers were touching the ground although the tops of their great furled arches extended a foot and a half above the circle of light that rimmed his head. It wasn’t a comedy halo, like a battery-powered quoit, but a solid disk half as bright as the winter sun. He was dressed in a dazzling-white robe that hung loose from his broad shoulders to his sandaled feet. He looked slightly puzzled, but only in an intellectual sort of way—more curious than alarmed and not in the least discomposed.
No one was paying any attention to the angel, even though the passersby had nothing more pressing to do than was normal for a Tuesday morning in February. The shoppers and the truanting kids saw him all right, but they wouldn’t look directly at him and they made detours to avoid passing within arm’s reach of him. He couldn’t have alienated so much attention if he’d been carrying a clipboard, a blue pencil and a sheaf of questions about sanitary protection.
Molly almost paused—but during the little margin of hesitation that might have realized the almost she lost heart and quickened her step, just like everybody else.
Later, she told herself that she’d had to do it. She couldn’t afford to get involved in anything dodgy. She’d kept the affair with Elvis secret, of course; if she’d told anyone it would have got back to the social services. Not that she’d have been sectioned again—you practically had to kill someone to get sectioned these days—but it would have come up when the next group meeting considered the possibility of restoring custody of the kids. The only thing likely to have a worse effect on the average group meeting than the news that the client thought she’d had a fling with Elvis—even one that had never got as far as actual penetration—was the news that the client thought she’d been visited by an angel.
The entire audience for Touched by an Angel was probably made up of social workers, who presumably figured the show as the ultimate wet dream but couldn’t believe a word of it. It was very popular in the States, they said, but so was Elvis; neither played quite as well in Brixton, even on what the local Estate Agents called the “Dulwich fringe.”
Even so, she regretted falling into step with everybody else and pretending that the angel wasn’t there. It was cowardly. It was no consolation to think that angels’ missions were probably supposed to work that way. In all probability, nobody ever stopped to speak to an angel except the person the angel had come to see. There would be a certain propriety in that—and if angels couldn’t maintain propriety in this godforsaken world, who could?
When she saw the angel again he was standing outside the old Salvation Army Temple. There was a split second when she didn’t quite recognize him, but the face was unmistakable even though everything else about him had changed. His wings were only half the size they had been, and were now patterned like a pigeon’s. The nimbus was gone, although his hair was still luxuriant and golden blond. The white robe was gone, too, unless its trailing hem had been tucked up above the knee so that it could remain hidden within the tan-colored raincoat he was wearing—which seemed unlikely, given that the bottoms of a pair of grey flannel trousers were clearly visible, their turn-ups resting on brown suede loafers. He still seemed a trifle bewildered, and discomposure was beginning to creep up on him now.
The benches where the down-and-outs hung out were crowded, but none of the alkies was looking at the angel. They couldn’t have treated him with more disdain if he’d been a Tory councilor down from Westminster on a fact-finding tour.
Molly had thought for some months after it closed that the alkies kept returning to the Temple out of habit and sentiment, but Francine had eventually let her in on the secret that it was just round the corner from the lock-up where the local white van man stored the bottles and cans he shipped in from Eastenders three times a week. It was the cheapest source of strong cider for miles around. The white van man was called Lucas but the alkies called him Saint Luke because he allowed them to buy at wholesale prices without a trade card. The local crackheads looked upon the alkies with naked envy, knowing full well that their prices went up as their dependency increased—but their supplier insisted on being known as Saint John anyway, just for form’s sake.
Again, Molly almost stopped when she saw the angel, in spite of the fact that he was hanging about in a place where she usually quickened her paces in order to minimize the deluge of cackling abuse. Again, she couldn’t quite bring herself to interrupt her stride.
The down-and-outs weren’t in the least bothered by the fact that the angel could overhear them; they made all the usual remarks. They knew where Molly lived, and in their estimation—which was not unrepresentative of the world’s—that automatically made her a career whore whose current hundred-percent dependency on the social only signified that she was too ugly to get the kerb-crawlers to stop. That was what they called out, anyhow, although an alky would have to have very few memory cells left to be oblivious to the fact that kerb-crawlers would stop for anything in a skirt and heels, provided that she had a hole at the right height.
Molly never r
ose to the bait, as Francine and some of the other residents of the B&B were wont to do, but on this particular occasion she couldn’t suppress a blush. It was not on her own behalf that she suffered embarrassment but on behalf of the angel. It wasn’t much of an advertisement for humankind that the Sally Ann had had to close its Temple, or that all the street scum in the neighborhood gathered there to take what advantage they could of their friendly neighborhood smuggler, or that the very same street scum were prepared to pretend that the only thing stopping her from pulling down her knickers for them was that they had better things to do with their money.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 24
