The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (Mammoth Books)

by Paula Guran

  “Is this another test?” Dancy asks the mirror, and she imagines balling up her fist and punching the glass as hard as she can, imagines the blood and pain, the glittering shards and the silvery sound they would make falling into the rust-stained sink.

  “Christ, you can be a tiresome little cunt,” the girl in the mirror sighs, and now her face is changing, years rolling through her rose-colored eyes like waves against a sandy shore, waves to diminish her grain by grain and draw deep lines in her pale skin. And, in only a moment more, the girl in the mirror is a grown woman – thirty, thirty-five, forty – looking backwards at the lost child she was, or Dancy’s only looking ahead to the lost woman she’ll become, if she lives that long. Or maybe it works both ways, Dancy thinks, and she reaches out, expecting their fingers to brush, but there’s only the cold, impenetrable surface of the looking glass and her own sixteenyear-old face gazing back at her again.

  “Just a trick,” Dancy whispers, even though she doesn’t really believe it. “The angel said there would be lots of tricks.”

  The girl in the mirror says nothing more or less than Dancy says, and does nothing that she doesn’t do, and Dancy Flammarion turns her back on the sink, and whatever it might, or might not, mean. She makes sure her jeans are zipped, and tightens her belt again, and unlocks the restroom door.

  Dancy’s holding a red and white can of Campbell’s chicken and stars soup, the label enough to make her mouth water, and she thinks briefly about trying to steal it before she sets it back on the shelf. She glances towards the screen door leading out to the cloudy day and the old man and the front of the Texaco station. There’s a shiny black pickup truck idling by the pumps, and the old man is talking to the driver. No one who’s looking for her, just someone who’s stopped to buy gas or a pack of cigarettes, someone the old man knows, or maybe he talks like that to everyone who stops. Maybe he offers everyone a wintergreen Certs and tells them to be sure and flush.

  “He’s a son of a bitch,” she hears the old man say. “When the Good Lord was handin’ out assholes, that cocksucker went back for seconds.”

  The driver of the black truck laughs, laughs the way that fat men and very small demons laugh, and Dancy looks at the can of soup again.

  “Son of a whore wanted his money back,” the old man says. “I told him sure thing, just as soon as ol’ Gabriel starts playin’ taps.”

  The man from the black truck laughs again, and Dancy’s empty stomach rumbles.

  And then she looks the other way, towards the rear of the store. There’s another screen door back there that she didn’t notice before she went into the restroom, a door with a wooden plaque hung above it, but she has to get closer to read all the words painted on it. “Hyenas will howl in their fortified towers And jackals in their luxurious palaces,” the plaque declares in fancy calligraphic letters like the ones on the cover of her grandmother’s old Bible. Her fateful time also will soon come And her days will not be prolonged. Isaiah 13.19–22.

  “I’m doing my part,” she whispers, reaching for the brass door handle, smelling the musky wild animal smell getting in through the screen wire. “Now you better keep him busy long enough for me to finish this, you hear?”

  The angel doesn’t answer her, but then it rarely ever does, so she doesn’t take the silence one way or another.

  The door creaks very loudly, like the hinges have never once seen so much as a single drop of oil, the hinges and the long spring that’s there to snap the door closed again. Dancy steps over the threshold, eases the noisy door shut behind her, and now she’s standing on a small back porch cluttered with an assortment of crates and cardboard boxes and greasy, rusting pieces of machinery that she doesn’t recognize.

  And before she even sees the cage, before she sees what’s waiting in the cage, Dancy Flammarion is out on the highway again, the air filled with that thunder that isn’t thunder, and the Seraph shrieks and slices the storm-damp air with its sword of fire and molten steel.

  The scorching light pouring from the angel’s purple-blue eyes almost blinds her, and she turns her head away.

  In His right hand he held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance—

  On the porch behind the Texaco station, Dancy reaches for her knife, the big carving knife she used in Bainbridge, something else salvaged from the cabin in Shrove Wood. But her knife is still tucked safely inside the duffel bag, and her bag’s out front with the old man.

  And then she sees the cage, big enough to hold at least five panthers, a great confining box of thick steel bars and seam welds and black iron bolts. But the only thing inside is a naked woman huddled in the dirt and filthy hay covering the floor of the cage. Her long auburn hair hangs about her narrow face in knots and matted coils, and her skin is so streaked with shit and mud and grime that Dancy can’t be sure if she’s black or white or some other color altogether. The woman looks up, her eyes so deep and dark and filled with pain, and when she speaks Dancy thinks that it’s surely the most broken and desperate voice she’s ever heard from simple human lips.

  “Help me,” the woman pleads. “You have to help me. He’s insane.”

  Dancy slowly descends the four steps to the weathered square of concrete laid between the porch and the cage and stands only five or six feet back from the bars. “That old man locked you up in there?” she asks, and there are tears streaming from the woman’s brown eyes, eyes the same rich brown as chocolate. She nods her head and reaches through the bars for Dancy.

  I don’t have my knife, she thinks, half praying to anything that’s listening, and Dancy imagines the angel’s fiery sword sweeping down to divide her careless soul from her flesh, to burn her so completely that there’ll be nothing left to send to Hell.

  “He’s crazy,” the woman says. “He’s going to kill me. Whoever you are, you have to help me.”

  “He said there was a live panther back here,” Dancy tells her and looks over her shoulder at the back door of the little store, wondering if the old man is still busy talking to the guy in the pickup truck about the cocksucker who went back for seconds.

  “I just told you. He’s insane. He’ll say anything. Please.”

  “He put you in that cage? Why’d he do that? Why didn’t he just kill you?”

  “You’re not listening to me!” the woman hisses and bares her teeth; her voice has changed, has grown as angry and impatient as it was desperate and broken only a few seconds before. “We don’t have much time. He’ll figure out you’re back here and come after you.”

  Dancy looks at the heavy Yale padlock holding the cage door shut, and then she looks back at the woman. “I don’t have the key,” she says. “How am I supposed to open that, if I don’t have the key?”

  The woman’s dark eyes glimmer and flash, and Dancy realizes that they’re not the same color they were before, the deep and chocolate brown replaced suddenly by amber shot through with gleaming splinters of red. She retreats one step, then another, putting that much more distance between herself and the naked woman in the cage.

  “I know who you are, Dancy Flammarion. I know what you did in Bainbridge. I know about the angel.” And the woman’s voice has changed again, too. This is the voice of an animal that has learned to talk, or a human being who’s forgetting. “I know you’ve been sent here to save me.”

  “Who told you that?” Dancy asks, and she kicks at a loose bit of concrete, pretending that she isn’t afraid. “I was just looking for the panther, that’s all.”

  “We don’t have time for this shit,” the woman growls and seizes the iron bars in both hands, and now Dancy can see the long black claws where her fingernails used to be. The naked woman, who isn’t really a woman at all, slams herself against the bars so hard that the whole cage shakes and the padlock rattles loudly.

  “Now open this fucking cage!”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that,” Dancy says; her face feels hot and fl
ushed, and her heart’s beating so fast she thinks maybe it means to explode. “I don’t care what you are, I don’t like to be talked to that way.”

  The thing in the cage presses its face to the bars, and its thick lips curl back to show Dancy eyeteeth that have grown long and sharp, the teeth of something that hunts for its supper, something that might even send a panther packing. Its amber eyes blaze and spark, and Dancy tries not to imagine the soul burning beneath its skin, inside that skull, a soul so hot it will wither her own if she doesn’t look away.

  “What? You think you’re some kind of holy fucking saint,” it snarls and then makes a sound that isn’t precisely laughter. “Is that it? You think you’re something so goddamn pure that strong language is gonna make your ears bleed?”

  “I think maybe it’s a good thing, you being in that cage,” Dancy replies, almost whispering now.

  And the thing locked in the iron cage roars, half the cheated, bottomless fury in the whole world bound up in that roar, and then it slams itself against the bars again. Its bones have begun to twist and pop, rearranging themselves inside its shifting skin. Its hands have become a big cat’s paws, sickle talons sheathed in velvet, and its spine buckles and stretches and grows a long tail that ends in a tuft of black fur.

  And Dancy turns to run, because she doesn’t have her knife, because somehow she wasn’t ready for this, no matter what she saw in Bainbridge or Shrove Wood, no matter if maybe those things were more terrible; maybe the angel was wrong about this one. She turns to run, running for the first time, and she’ll worry about the angel later, but the old man is right there to stop her. He holds her firmly by the shoulders and grins down at her with his tobacco-stained teeth.

  “Where you goin’, sport? I thought you wanted to see my panther?”

  “Let go of me. I told you I ain’t got three dollars.”

  “Hey, that’s right. You did say that. So that makes this sort of like stealin’, don’t it? That means you owe me somethin’,” and he spins her roughly around so she’s facing the cage again. The thing inside has changed so much that there’s hardly any trace of the cowering, filthy woman left; it paces restlessly, expectantly, from one side of the cage to the other, its burning, ravenous eyes never leaving Dancy for very long. And she can still hear its animal voice inside her head.

  You were supposed to save me, it lies. You were supposed to set me free.

  “Big ol’ cat like that one there,” the old man says and spits a stream of Beech-Nut onto the concrete, “she’ll just about eat a fella out of house and home. And seein’ as how you owe me that three bucks—”

  “Do you even know what you’ve got in that cage, old man? You got any idea?”

  “Near enough to know she ain’t none too picky in her eatin’ habits.”

  “You don’t hold a thing like that with steel and locks,” Dancy says, matching the monster’s gaze because she knows this has gone so far that it’ll be worse for her if she looks away.

  “Oh, don’t you fret about locks. I might not be old Mr Merlin at the goddamn Round Table, but I can cast a binding good enough. Now, tell me somethin’, Dancy,” the old man says and shoves her nearer the cage. “How far d’you think you’d get after that mess you made down in Bainbridge? You think they were gonna just let you stroll away, pretty as you please?”

  And she reaches for her grandfather’s straight razor, tucked into the back pocket of her jeans, not her knife but it’s plenty enough to deal with this old wizard.

  “You think there’s not gonna be a price to pay?” he asks, watching the thing in the cage, and he doesn’t even notice until it’s too late and she’s folded the razor open. The blade catches the dull, cloud-filtered sun and shines it back at her.

  “Whole lot of good folks out there want you dead, sport. Lots of folks, they want you fuckin’ crucified. It’s only a matter of time before some ol’ boy puts you down for what you done.”

  But then she slips free of his big, callused hands, and before the old man can say another word, she’s slashed him twice across the face, laying open his wrinkled forehead all the way to the bone and slicing a three-inch gash beneath his chin that just misses his carotid artery. The old man yelps in pain and surprise and grabs for her, but Dancy steps quickly to one side and shoves him stumbling towards the cage. He trips and goes down hard on his knees; the wet crunch of shattered bone is loud, and the thing that isn’t a woman or a panther stops pacing and lunges towards the bars and the old man.

  “Yeah, that may be so,” Dancy says, breathless, blood spattered across her face and T-shirt and dripping from the razor to the cracked gray concrete. “But you won’t be the one to do it.”

  And then the thing is on him, dragging the old man up against side of the cage, its sickle claws to part his clothes and flesh like a warm fork passing through butter, but he only screams until it wriggles its short muzzle between the bars and bites through the top of his skull. The old man’s body shudders once and is still. And then the thing looks up at her, more blood spilling from its jaws, flecks of brain and gore caught in its long whiskers.

  “Well?” it growls at her. “You gonna do what they sent you here to do, or you just gonna stand there all damn day with your mouth hanging open?”

  Dancy nods her head once, wanting to tell it that there’s no way she could have ever opened the cage door, even if she had the key, even if the angel hadn’t told her to kill them both.

  “Then you best stop gawking and get to work.”

  And Dancy wipes the bloody razor on her jeans, then folds it shut, and she runs back up the steps to the cluttered porch and the noisy screen door and the shadows waiting for her inside the little store.

  It doesn’t take her very long to find what she’s looking for among the dusty shelves and pegboard wall displays – a cardboard box of Diamond kitchen matches and a one-gallon gasoline can. She takes out a handful of the wooden matches and puts them in her pocket, tears away the strip of sandpaper on the side of the box, and puts that in her pocket as well. Then Dancy gets a paper bag from behind the cash register and also takes some of the Campbell’s chicken and stars soup and a handful of Zero bars, some Slim Jims and a cold bottle of Coca-Cola. While she’s bagging the food, she hears thunder, and at first she thinks that it’s the angel, the angel come back around to check up on her, to be sure she’s doing it right. But then there’s lightning and the tat-tat-tat of rain starting to fall on the tin roof, so she knows it’s only another thunderstorm. She rolls the top of the paper bag down tight and tells herself it’s not stealing, not really, that she’s not taking much and nothing that she doesn’t need, so whatever it is, it isn’t stealing.

  Over the staccato patter of the rain against the roof, she can hear the noises the cat thing in its cage is making as it tears the old man apart. She thinks about looking for a key to the cage, no matter what the angel has said. The old man might have it hidden in the register, or somewhere in the clutter behind the counter, or in an old snuff tin somewhere. She might get lucky and find it, if it’s even there to be found, if she spends the rest of the afternoon searching the Texaco station. Or she might not. And anyway, there would still be the binding spell, and she wouldn’t know where to begin with that.

  “It’s just another monster,” Dancy says, as though saying the words aloud might make it easier for her to believe them. And she remembers her mother reading to her from the Bible about King Darius and Daniel and the angel God sent down to shut the mouths of the lions in the pit. Would it even be grateful, the thing in the cage, or would it try to kill her for setting it free? And would her angel shut its mouth, or would it let the thing eat her the way it’s eating the old man? Would that be her punishment for disobeying the angel’s instructions?

  Then there’s another thunderclap, louder than the first, loud enough to rattle the windows, and this time the lightning follows almost right on top of it, no seconds in between to be counted, no distance to calculate, and Dancy takes her brown paper ba
g and the matches and the gas can and goes out to the pumps. The screen door slams shut behind her, and she finds her duffel bag right where she left it with the old man, beneath the corrugated tin awning. The rain’s not coming down so hard as she thought, but she has a feeling it’s just getting started. She opens the duffel and tucks the paper bag inside with her clothes and the carving knife, then Dancy shoulders the heavy duffel again and steps out from beneath the cover of the awning.

  The rain feels good, the soothing tears of Heaven to wash her clean again, and she goes to the pump marked regular, switches it on, and fills the gasoline can to overflowing. Then she lays the nozzle down on the ground at her feet, and the fuel gushes eagerly out across the gravel and the mud and cement. Dancy takes a few steps back, then stands there in the rain and watches the wide puddle that quickly forms around the pumps. She wrinkles her nose at the fumes, and glances up at the low purple-black clouds sailing past overhead. The rain speckles her upturned face; it’s cold, but not unpleasantly so.

  “Is this really what you want from me?” she asks the clouds, whatever might be up there staring down at her. “Is this really what happens next?” There’s no answer, because the angel doesn’t ever repeat itself.

  Dancy picks up the gas can, and there’s a moment when she’s afraid that it might be too heavy now, that the weight of the duffel bag and the full can together might be too much for her to manage. But then she shifts the duffel to one side, ignoring the pain as the thick canvas strap cuts into her right shoulder, and the can doesn’t seem so heavy after all. She splashes a stream of gasoline that leads from the pumps, across the highway and then down the road for another hundred yards, before she stops and sets down the almost empty can.

  This is what I do, she thinks, taking one of the matches and the rough strip of cardboard from her pocket. Just like our cabin, just like that old church in Bainbridge, this is what I do next.