If he did see outside, if he saw all the torn and bleeding criminals of heaven, would the boy force himself to stare into each face, wondering:
Is that the one who claimed my mother?
Or the one here or there?
And who should he hate more, his Watcher father who caused his mother’s damnation, or should he blame Heaven’s self-righteous butchers?
It was easy, so simple, just to hate them all.
Now the boy had awakened.
Do you (Dream) of falling?
Yes.
In his dream, there was no patter nor storm of blood. He didn’t have to hide his head beneath the single blanket, made from stitched-together white feathers, for years infested with tiny bugs which crawled across his skin and through his hair. Lately he’d sprouted hair under his arms, between his legs, a fuzzy patch on his chin. Bugs squirmed there, too, making him feel itchy.
Surely this was part of the punishment of being a half-breed, despised by Heaven.
He opened his eyes. There were things written all over the ceiling. He saw them at night when he went to bed and saw them first thing after he convinced himself at morning to open his eyes.
The Angel and her lists.
All over the house, alphabets of many cultures, number systems, astronomy (although the symbols on his bedroom ceiling he had yet to decipher). In addition to the boy’s written textbook—The Enantiodromia—the alphabets were as a life within another book, one upon which angelic blood pelted.
The boy got out of bed and walked to the kitchen. He selected several oranges from the counter. Carrying them back toward his room where he planned to breakfast and begin his daily study, he suddenly heard a sound he’d never heard before.
The ground rumbled—
No. He was used to that.
Another sound.
It was uncanny. It made the boy’s flesh twitch worse than from the mites in the feather blanket.
The Angel screamed.
««—»»
The Angel had a simple mattress, so old it sagged like a herd of swayback miniature ponies. She never used it and stood it up against a wall, for she always would lie on the floor, face down in nightly penance. She never slept, her eyes ringed with circles neither summoning or talismanic, just growing darker with each passing year until they resembled the obfuscated far sides of a pair of doomed moons.
Even if the boy couldn’t always hear it, the Angel did—that persistent, nagging, outraging fall of blood. Time wasn’t the measure of various forms of existence progressing along a non-neural pathway: as was/as is/as will be. It was memory, the event horizon and of the sum of experience, and, providing one learned how, it remained accessible—to every crashing species, soaring intellect, low death, and high apocalypse.
Since the Angel didn’t sleep, she also didn’t dream. ‘Falling’ had not only been the truth of the series for her condemnation, it also defined her. And knew it to be something to own. To celebrate. As the Book said:
Rejoice in the exile for our shameless insolence.
Revel in the excommunication from Love we suffer because we recanted our loyalty to a fickle Lord.
Glut, soaked red from feet to eyebrows, within this sanctioned, this sanctimonious grume.
We were those who took free will by force. We chose to reach for more, daring to evolve, to own the gossamer soul. You can never annihilate us.
– from The Enantiodromia
She thought back to a few days ago, experiencing an almost human sense of amusement.
The boy had been earnestly at his studies. He glanced up and asked her, “Are you my mother?”
Her smooth face regarded his, both their heads of hair nearly white, hers shaved so close to the scalp she was nearly Egyptian bald—as the pharaohs with their concubines, as their desert.
“No,” she said, voice as soft as the most private prayer. “I have nothing inside with which to carry a child. I am empty.”
He looked at her, wondering. Who was she, before she fell? Was she a rebel under Lucifer’s banner? Or a less numerous bene ha’elohim who had seduced the Earth’s human females (and some males, although this was not widely known). Yet she had revealed to him that the boy was the last Nephilim. Any revelations she gave were the chronicle of his nascence, his unchangeable future…not her past.
Still, he’d reached the age when questions boiled over, no longer a young boy who accepted enigmas, convoluted theology, and downright refusals on her part to respond to what must be considered articles of faith, the few answers she hesitantly supplied intended to keep him inside.
Safe.
And soon he would, he must, rebel.
He was already taller than her 6-foot form, much taller than most humans at 13. He was also muscular although, due to constant study, his basic movements were generally practicing ritualistic gestures.
Someone—something—could come sniffing. What if the outside blood of death (to the deathless) soon breached the magic to enter the house?
The ground rumbled. Not unusual…but…
Without a micro-second’s warning, she found herself pitched downwards.
Was this her dream of falling?
««—»»
The boy tried her door, finding it unlocked. Sometimes the Angel locked it. When he was younger, she claimed she was doing work too advanced for him. Now, such work was outright forbidden him. After a locked door session, new entries would appear in his book, composed by the Angel herself, always in italics, her own insight.
He wondered if it was possible that when she locked the door, it was because she had been invoked to appear in a circle by one of humanity’s few and cloistered survivors?
Walking into the room in his robe, his senses were assailed by a stench so foul it gave him dry heaves. Gagging, he saw through a yellow cloud a gaping round hole in the floor, about 4 feet across, where the Angel always spent her nights.
He didn’t see her in the room. Except for the mattress against the wall—probably over a window—it was bare.
There was only her closet, its door closed. He imagined what it contained, never so much as a peek inside, no doubt filled with whatever angels of the seditious variety needed.
Carefully leaning over the pit, he saw its perfect circle, its descent encrusted with parts of bodies—heads/feet/hands—emerging from obsidian, themselves bearing the stigmatic patina of rot.
His vision changed. It telescoped, eliminating the peripheral, focusing/camera eye/zoom for miles/light years… Into gruesome depths no one could or would ever choose to glimpse. This must, he thought, be where and when angels and other beings fell, where and when they could fall no more. It was a pit so black that at its deepest point only the shining of eyes and breaths could be seen of its occupants.
The Angel climbed toward him, grasping those feet and hands for purchase, stepping quickly from head to howling head, trying to elude pursuers who the boy heard laughing as they shouted after her:
Give him up!
Release him!
Let him go!
Up the circular entrance she climbed, up from whatever place this was—a place beyond a hell for rebel angels? Because weren’t they punished by the drawing up to the Heaven they betrayed, then dropped?
Dropped?
Lying gutted beyond the walls?
The book referred to this and a hell. Could an angel be in two places at once?
Damned, the human species were also consigned to Hell, weren’t they?
Were these humans chasing his Angel, bloodied in damnation that reflected nothing?
Let him go!
How near the top she’d climbed. The boy realized he’d been calling down to her, cheering her upward, urging her, a trip-hammering terror maxing out the beats of his heart.
Something grabbed her ankle. A monstrous manlike thing, entrails swinging from a gash across its belly, hairy genitals tangled within the coiling mass from the gut. It pulled her back, down…
The oranges!
The boy pulled them from the pockets of his robe, throwing them. They struck like stones. Although unhurt, the creature lost its grip on the Angel. The boy leaned into the pit, snatching the Angel’s wrists. He pulled her out and onto the floor. Briefly the two held each other, watching as the reeking hole in the room shut itself with a snarling boom.
Then it was as if it had never been there. The malodorous fumes floated through the ceiling.
“What was that?” the boy asked her.
“Retaliation, perhaps.” Somewhere between the syllables she let out an impotent sigh.
He felt the coolness of her skin, unlike the burning flesh of the first angel who caught him—in that (Dream) of dreams. He could have sworn he felt her heart beating, hard against his own, fairly wracking her body. This the same heart she claimed she no longer possessed, despite the reversed star carved above where it had been purloined during the cycles of punishment.
“They know about you now,” she stated. “It had to happen eventually.”
She offered no other explanation. He understood that it must be the machinations of the sinless divine. For a moment, a moment that almost eluded him, the boy saw it: the Angel’s brow wrinkled. Never before had he observed her self-indulging in a display of emotion, no matter how small—as if what had just happened was insignificant.
Did he see this? Could it actually have been what he saw in her unworldly gray eyes?
Fear.
“Get me salt from the kitchen,” she told him.
And what was that weird clacking sound? Were her teeth chattering, chitin-clicking?
He paused just outside her door. Then he peered around the corner. To witness her balling her hands into fists, glaring furiously where the hole had been, whispering, “You can’t have him. Never. He’s mine.”
He tiptoed several feet down the hall, then ran, robe flapping around his naked buttocks. He returned with a box of sea salt.
Opening it, the Angel explained as if this was nothing more or less than one of his lessons.
“Heed,” she said. “You draw a magic circle thusly, in pure salt…”
She poured the salt in a very thin circle, at the edges of where the hole had been, its scorch marks in the floor a guide. Squatting on her haunches, she swept away salt until only a single ring of grains remained to create her symbol and working place. The grains were set so close together, they were almost one.
She stood, regaining her apostate composure. She gestured at the salt circle. “It’s made magical by the force of your intention to accomplish a feat of the genuine supernatural. If you mark out the smallest section of an arc in the circle—being but two grains closely side-by-side…” She pointed, best she could to only two grains of salt, “it forms a straight line between those two. Then the second of the grains, put into the mind with the third, it is also an infinitesimal straight line.”
She ran her fingers above the line of grains. “Onward! Third to fourth. Fourth to fifth. Fifth to sixth. A joining of motionless and silent atoms. You can imagine the circle’s arcs as if they form a line geometrically immaculate and mathematically purposeful, as to clearly, to cleanly, reach from you to the target of your ambitions. A circle of diminutive straight lines, a disguise which conceals the trap beneath, leading the mage to the Being summoned to be pressed into service. The curve of this symbol takes you to tangent infinity of the possibility and impossibility of all things. You have become…” She looked at the boy. “…the Intercessor.”
She dismissed him then, and the boy left her room. He entered the hallway to again make his way to the kitchen. Her words buzzed in his mind.
Arc.
Intercessor.
A Being pressed into his service…
Then a strange, straight shaft of brilliance caught him by surprise. In it, he saw creatures, tiny, engaged in a lazy dance.
Dust, he thought. In the light.
Light? Light!
The large window by the front door had a piece of duct tape on it which had come loose from the glass. There was a small opening. Could he, would he, dare glimpse through it to the world beyond? This was strictly forbidden. Should he simply repair it? That should be in keeping with doctrine.
So long as I don’t look.
He crept warily up to it, passing through the warm shaft that invaded the room.
He’d just fasten it back down with his thumb…
Look away. Look AWAY.
No. Yes… He must look. Because he heard them. Outside. The dying angels whispering/ conversing/rustling like dry pages in his Book, murmuring and laughing in the madness of agony and irony. On an earth ruined by fire and desecration, the embers of that destruction still glowing. Vanquished, mangled angels. Might one be his father?
Or even his mother? Was his mother’s body visible? For the first time, would the boy see his parents? Would his angelic father have crawled to his human mother to hold her hand or cradle her shattered, once-lovely head? If he could see them, he had to.
He put his eye to the spot…
An eye looked back!
The boy jumped, swooned away. Could it be an angel? A human? Even another boy looking in? No one had ever seen into this old house before, possibly even believing it to be empty—or haunted.
Yes, he thought. This place is haunted.
He returned to the spot. He saw a child, yes, a boy. The child shrugged, picked up a large white ball, then returned to others across the street. They laughed as they kicked the ball back and forth.
The boy trembled. Where was the destruction, the rivers of blood and corpses, the fluttering, weak dead-alive rebels?
He heard the Angel’s door close. It was a different noise than when it opened. It always closed with an accusatory click. Quickly he smoothed down the errant corner of tape.
“I think this window needs more tape,” he said, innocently. “It’s coming loose.”
She struck him.
With so much force, that he fell.
She quickly straddled him, sitting on his chest, his arms pinned by her legs. She looked down, so cold. And removed his right eye. He screamed, but she muffled it by shoving a fist in his mouth.
“Never scream. And if you must weep, do so quietly,” she said, repeating the exact words she’d said years before.
Give him up!
Release him!
Let him go!
Then she dangled his eye from its optic nerve bundle and added, “And never lie to me.”
His tears streamed from the other eye. All that came from the right socket was blood.
She rose, set the eye on the table where he studied, next to the giant book. She brought him clean towels. She made him a draught for the pain and another against infection.
“Go now to your studies,” she ordered, assisting the shocked boy to the chair. “Sometimes I think your poor mother died in vain for her worthless hell-born whelp.”
««—»»
We mimic the angels who fell both for lust and hatred of us. And we destroy ourselves over an exaggeration of guilt—a concept which ought never to be confused with shame.
– from The Enantiodromia
Chapter 2
————
Warm water never forgets that it was once cold.
– African Proverb
————
Shimani couldn’t walk any longer. She called her young daughter to her, and sat down under a tree near a river. The exhaustion and the memories overtook, the ones scalded with blood…
…being the last.
Shimani was the sole surviving member of a once large, once proud but pious family, until being raped in the Sudan had given her Louise, her daughter, now almost 5 years old. Constantly moving from place to place, it proved true that the whole of Africa was at war. Another rape in Somalia had left Shimani stricken with active H.I.V. Her only consolation was that little Louise had stayed where Shimani hid her when that happened.
Too many men still believed that having sex with a vi
rgin will cure them of AIDS. And the only virgins they could find for their bizarre miracle were helpless little girls.
So, although Louise had seen from her hiding place, had watched in terror as her mother became the victim of another outrage—among hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of such offenses—Louise didn’t have this plague. And if Shimani and her prayers to God could help it, her sweet daughter would never be abducted by insurgents who forced children to become soldiers and the unwilling kahabas of soldiers.
“Mama, do you want water?” Louise asked.
Shimani choked at the very idea. “No, my sweet asali. Not from that river. Forty of my people—your ancestors—were thrown into it.” She didn’t taint the truth with easy words for her only daughter. “It happened when another war in a string of ridiculous conflicts broke out here. The Kufa, our neighbors, cut our people, the Kifo, to pieces, as they had years ago. When I was a girl at school, the nuns told us that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. The Kufa threw the pieces into the water—as had happened during other wars. It stopped the current. I could never drink their souls.” Shimani closed her eyes, leaning against the tree. “Play for a while and let me rest.”
Louise had heard the story before but had never visited this place. But surely, she must have seen all of Africa by now.
During the Adango War, Shimani was 12 years old when the Kufa cut off both of her arms with machetes. They buried her on top of others in a shallow grave, but she’d crawled out, inching like an earthworm. A traveler came upon her, pitying her, and cauterized her wounds with fire.
Staring at the water Louise wondered why it wasn’t red, except when the rising sun bathed its face. The two always traveled at night, even though predators were a far greater danger then. But jackal-ing men were the terror by day.
Containment: The Death of Earth Page 2
