Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts

by Stephen Jones (ed)

  The CCTV system. He located the tape player and saw that it was empty. He cursed. Grealish had forgotten to load a cassette. But he knew that this was unlikely. Grealish was one of the most crime-conscious, paranoid individuals he had ever met. In a cupboard next to the player he found dozens of cassettes. Every one of them had been labeled and Grealish’s neat handwriting provided a date and times for each recording. There was no tape covering this morning’s events, when Grealish had effectively sacked Malpas.

  Malpas sighed. Something bad had happened here, he was sure of it, but the evidence did not suggest foul play. He shook his head. There was no evidence. A mug of unwanted tea. Any moment, he would hear the flush of a toilet and Grealish would return with his newspaper, wanting to know why Malpas was standing in a staff-only area.

  But the lack of a cassette in the player, that was not like his friend. He would not have gone home without turning off the lights and locking up. Despite the apparent lack of a crime and a perpetrator, Malpas felt threat in the factory, close against him, smothering, despite its cavernous interior. Every second he spent here was a second closer to something awful befalling him, he was convinced of it.

  He caught himself staring at the door—for minutes, it must have been—waiting for it to swing inward and something formed from the night’s unedifying ingredients, the dark, the diesel exhaust, the fog, would swarm inside and slice him apart on its razorwire teeth.

  He stepped back and something cracked underfoot. He shifted his balance so that his full weight would not crush what he suspected to be beneath this slew of paper: a cassette. This day’s date was written on the label. A long crack ran across its surface, but the tape beneath was not disturbed. He could only hope it would still function when he fed it to the loading tray.

  The unbearably long wait as the tape whined and whirred into position and was rewound. White noise. Flickers and jags. And Grealish’s bookshop in smeared black, white and grey. The playback was shared between various areas of the factory. The counter area, the delivery bay at the rear of the building, and two views from the upper floor.

  Malpas had arrived not long after the shop had opened, yet he refrained from messing around with the cueing buttons. If the cassette was damaged, he didn’t want to risk snapping it by placing any further tension on the tape.

  He saw the empty loading bay with its collection of rotting pallets and recycling bins, its surface pockmarked with craters and patches of ragwort. He saw the counter where Grealish sipped his tea and leaned over his ledger like a monk illustrating scriptures. He saw the upper floor east and then the upper floor west, where books were crammed into mazy shelves two or three levels deep.

  Watching the screen refresh every ten seconds or so, Malpas’ thoughts began to drift. He pictured customers that had become lost in the aisles, claimed by the dust and cobwebs, assimilated by the books themselves, so deep in the factory that they would never be found, their flesh and bones and organs turned by weird, literary alchemy into text.

  The loading bay, the counter, the upper floor. The loading bay, the counter, the upper floor.

  Malpas saw Grealish’s head snap up. He watched as his own raincoat moved towards the counter, the crow in the parcel tucked under his arm. Shadow fussed about Malpas’ head like a cloud of midges. The image stuttered and warped. Malpas smelled hot plastic and wondered if the fracture in the housing had caused the tape to catch and overheat. But the image settled and jumped upstairs.

  Another shadow now, emerging from the stacks of books like a surge of spilled liquid. Cut to the loading bay. Cut to the counter. Grealish magicking away the parcel and averting his gaze. Speaking. He could just make out the words: There are words in this old shop that must never be unearthed. Malpas frowned.

  Cut to the upper floor. A figure moving away from the camera. In the next shot, from the other end of the factory, the figure calmly approached, but began to shiver and jerk violently before any identification could be made. The loading bay and its enviable space. Grealish again, using his hands to indicate to Malpas that their partnership was over. Handing over the fifty. Both heads snapping to the side at a sound coming from above. By the time the camera had returned to the counter, Malpas had left and Grealish was still staring up at the ceiling.

  The upper floor showed the figure descending. Regardless of what might happen to the tape, Malpas stabbed the pause button as the head sank into view. It jumped around in apparent disregard of the state Malpas had deigned for it. A face, of sorts. The eyes were broad black holes: sunglasses, surely, although Malpas could no longer be sure. The mouth was too thin and corrupted by movement to register on the image. As he watched, the eyes seemed to enlarge, as if they were ink stains on tissue paper.

  He released the pause and the figure sank out of view. By the time the camera had returned to the counter, Grealish was sitting bolt upright in his chair, his face a ruin of fear and panic and ... what looked like rapture. His eyes were closed, the pen in his hand moving all the while.

  A shadow was sliding into the frame. It was huge, cuneiform, as if the person casting it had spread a cloak above his head, as children do with their coats in playgrounds, pretending to be vampires. Light filled the screen, so bright that Malpas had to turn away. The tape ended.

  There are words in this old shop that must never be unearthed.

  Must? Surely Grealish had said “might”? Perhaps he had, and Malpas’ lip-reading skills were in need of a polish. Did it matter, anyway?

  But then he thought it did. He was convinced Grealish had given him a lead. But if there was a message for him in this shop, it might take him centuries to unveil it, even if he were to know what it was he was looking for. The tape played on, showing its empty rooms. Eventually, the steam from Grealish’s mug disappeared.

  Malpas sat down on the chair and leaned across Grealish’s ledger. Surely not, he thought. But he pushed back and raised the great, heavy cover. No figures in here. No debit and credit columns. In Grealish’s tiny, tidy handwriting—he had managed to squeeze three lines of text into lines meant for one—was a journal stretching back decades, to when Grealish was a child.

  Malpas gathered up the great book and, struggling with its weight, hurried out of the door and into the estate. He caught a taxi home, only cursing, for a moment, the extravagance of such action. His own accounts could wait if there was something in this book that might yet save his friend.

  On the way he checked regularly through the back window to see if the cab was being followed, but the traffic was light and there was no obvious tail. The driver, thankfully, did not try to engage him in conversation. He tapped guitarist’s fingernails against the steering wheel in time to a song that was inaudible to Malpas’ ears.

  He paid the driver, not waiting to receive his paltry change, and hurried through the entrance doors to the lift. Two boys of around ten years old were hunched by its side, their mouths smacking around wads of gum, trying to start a fire with pages torn from a pornographic magazine. They ignored Malpas completely. He was used to it, and grateful, too. He didn’t engage with any of his neighbors, nor they with him. It was better, safer, that way, he thought now, as he ascended.

  Safer for whom? A voice, raucous, raw, asked him as he approached his front door, shaking the key free of the bunch. You ... or them?

  He teased the door open and shifted the keys into the center of his palm, curling his hand into a fist, the blades of the keys sticking out among his knuckles. “Get out!” he shouted, but his voice wouldn’t back up the intimidation he’d intended.

  He stepped into the flat, but he knew, he felt, that it was empty. Nothing had been disturbed here. He closed the door and rubbed his forehead, as if this might prove to him that the voice was coming from his own head. He placed the ledger on the sofa and mixed himself a strong whisky and soda. On the way back, he picked up his magnifying glass from the workbench, hesitating only slightly when he thought that the crow’s eyes had swiveled a fraction to watch hi
m.

  Nonsense. But he threw a cloth over the bird anyway, to conceal it.

  He sat down and opened the ledger to the latest entry. Yesterday’s date. Something had interrupted Grealish because he had not completed the last sentence in the final paragraph. The handwriting was no longer pristine, it was all over the paper:

  I can only do so much to help him. But I am getting old. Getting weak. Jumping at shadows. The barriers I erected have all come crashing down. I’m the final obstacle. Some guardian I turned out to be. I could do with a guardian angel of my own. But I gave my all and I tried my best. It is of some comfort to me to know that I will not be present at the grand judgment, the fiery end. I hope, only, that it comes quickly for him, and that he is not given a glimpse of what he once was. And yes, it comes on, now it comes on, and I feel its heat, but I will not look up. I will not look into that sunken face. I will not scream for mercy, Samael, blind God, destroyer, you foul reaper, you evil shephe.

  Malpas lifted his glass to take another drink only to find it already empty. His heart was beating bird-fast. Black spots burst across his vision. What was this? What was this madness? He had never marked Grealish down as the type to rant. He was calm, ordered, punctilious in the extreme. Yet maybe this ledger was where he allowed his pressure seal to vent steam. Wasn’t it true that the quietest of us were the ones to keep your eye on?

  He flicked back a few dozen pages. Entries from five years previously:

  We lose our way, sometimes. The map is ignored because we come to know a place so intimately, or we think we do. There’s always a left turn to catch us out. Always a misremembered street or a white space that we didn’t recall in the A-Z. Finding your way back, geographically (or otherwise), is difficult when you’ve spent so long wandering lonely paths. What you believe is real is a forgotten or a binned version of the cartographer’s sketchbook. You walk in missteps. You fumble at doors that ought never to have been erected. You stumble blindly down alleys fringed with things that would have you open to the spine in seconds were you to wander off the track. You lose your wings. The skin heals over. You forget how to fly. You search for love, or friendship, or warmth and all the while it’s all of these things and none of these things. You seek home. You look to be back among the magnificent beasts of your upbringing. A childhood that lasted for millennia.

  And back. Ten years, now.

  In this way, he ... shall we say ... keeps the wolves from the door. Every suture, every bond, every socket sewn shut serves, in some small way, to lock his secret away for a little longer. To misdirect his predator. It masks him, this business. And there is poetry here, is there not? In these suspended lives there can be identified his own life, put on hold while he flaps around. One of his own birds. Fragile. Canny. Carrion-eater.

  Towards the front of the ledger, Malpas was amazed, and shocked, to find pictures of himself in the ledger’s earliest pages, drawn in a childish hand by Grealish who, judging by the dates, could have been no older than seven. Here he was, unchanged (apart from his black hair) and his hunched posture, wearing his black, shabby raincoat, strutting about like, well, he supposed, like some crow. A silver chain led from his hand up, into the sky, where it seemed to be tethered into the heart of the sun. And now, after further scrutiny, the raincoat appeared to be nothing of the sort. It was scruffy, long wings; oily feathers folded into themselves. He felt his shoulder blades twitch as if in recognition.

  Where the angels kissed you.

  Malpas jerked his head towards the cracked, rasping voice, so violently he felt a pain tear through the base of his skull. The cloth was shifting above the dead crow.

  He could not get up. Fear had nailed him fast to the sofa. He watched as the crow shifted and began clearing its lungs with its awful, hacking call. The cloth fell away from it, and the crow was revealed as a creature half-completed, a taxidermist’s project gone wrong, something sent to the production stages before the blueprint had been signed off.

  This was no sacred secret. This was Nature’s joke. It cried out again and the sound rattled the windows. Its organs writhed in the cavity of its chest like parasitic worms squirming in the remains of roadkill. Its beak was a soft, grey facsimile of the real thing.

  Malpas watched, horrified, as it dropped off, so much necrotic tissue. The blind man was in its face, now, writhing there like a nightmare made solid. It flexed its wings and a cloud of ash and soil was flung up around the bird, obscuring the room behind it, and dimming the light.

  Too late he realized who had laid this bird in his path. He had been trapped by the commitment to his own bleak hobby.

  I have searched for you for so long, Malpas. I have traveled a universe of distance on this unedifying little rock, trying to catch your scent.

  Malpas tried for a moment to believe that this was an illusion, that he was inventing horror to punish himself. But all too soon he saw that it was real. “What did you do to Grealish?”

  He feared you, did you know that? His entire life he was scared to the marrow of you. He protected you with his all, though.

  “What?” Malpas’ lips had turned to shavings of wood.

  There are some here, still, who would sacrifice their life to save someone lower than the low. But I’m here to tell you your exile is over. We’re taking you back into the fold.

  Malpas thought of the crows he had so lovingly restored for Grealish, and he grasped the significance of the hairs, used in a bid to confuse that monster’s scent, to sidetrack him, delay him all this time from having Malpas within reach of his black, ancient claws. He wondered now, about the boy and who he was. He wondered, as vomit sprang to his throat, if he himself, after all, might have killed him. Grealish, too, had died for this deceit. He had known who Malpas was, and had managed to live with it, when such knowledge might dash the sense from other men’s brains and turn them into idiots.

  He owed Grealish one last display of solidarity. The sore points at his shoulder blades sparked to life. He understood the origin of their pain, now. Nothing so mundane as arthritis. A part of him, hidden, buried, knew what it meant to fly, understood the thrill. It might be lovely to know that experience once more. But what he had forgotten, what he didn’t know, couldn’t harm him.

  His wings might have been torn from him by demons ... or they might simply have turned vestigial, forgotten, withered from lack of use ... well, it didn’t matter anymore.

  Despite his monumental age, he was more a man of this world than Samael’s rarefied clime.

  He drained his glass and threw it at the crow. The blind man ducked it, roared, enlarged. Malpas was laughing by now. He knew he was free. Even as Samael flicked his wrist and sent a hot, liquid chain of gold towards his hand, Malpas was moving, finding a speed that he had not known for centuries. The chain rammed home into the scar, but it was a restraint that had no strength for what he had planned.

  Malpas flung himself at the window as Samael shrieked his objection and, in a matter of seconds, in the instant before impact, Malpas saw himself as a child, many thousands of years previously. It was an image that stayed with him for the mere moments that he remained airborne. Yet he was able to call out, at the moment of his death, the word that meant more to him than any other in his charmed existence: “Father.”

  BASILEUS

  Robert Silverberg

  ROBERT SILVERBERG is a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. He began submitting stories to science fiction magazines in his early teens, and his first published novel, a children’s book entitled Revolt on Alpha C, appeared in 1955. He won his first Hugo Award the following year.

  Always a prolific writer—for the first four years of his career he reputedly wrote a million words a year—his numerous books include such novels as To Open the Sky, To Live Again, Dying Inside, Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle. The latter became the basis for his popular Majipoor series, set on the eponymous al
ien planet. A rare new fantasy novella, “The Last Song of Orpheus,” was recently published by Subterranean Press.

  “‘Basileus’ is about a computer nerd who can call up real angels on his computer,” explains the author. “It’s full of convincing-sounding stuff about hardware, software, programming and such. It brims with incidental detail about the special qualities of particular angels.

  “ I don’t believe in the existence of angels. And I had never used a computer at the time, back in October of 1982, when I wrote the story.

  “You see what tricky characters professional writers of fiction are? When I sit down to write a story, I’m willing to tell you any damn thing at all, and I’m capable of making you believe it, because for the time that I’m writing the story I believe it myself.

  “In the case of ‘Basileus’ I needed a story idea and I had, for the moment, run absolutely dry. One tactic that I’ve sometimes used when stuck for an idea is to grab two unrelated concepts at random, jam them together, and see if they strike any sparks. I tried it. I picked up the day’s newspaper and glanced quickly at two different pages. The most interesting words that rose to my eye were ‘computers’ and ‘angels.’”