THE GROWTH OF A CONSCIENCE-EARLY 1900s
Nisroc spent hours each day riding the the new electric streetcars that had changed the way he got around Charlotte.
Not only did these rides take him to the offices of
their various businesses, but it just felt good to Nisroc to ride while someone else drove him. Angelique said he could have his own car and driver, but he liked the anonymity of the streetcar better. He spent as much time studying passengers as he did viewing the passing views of the city.
In June of 1911, he was on the line that went out to the suburbs when a female passenger seemed to lose her mind. She sat across the aisle from him, a package tied with string in her hand. Suddenly she threw the package onto the floor between them, stood and began to sway and keen, an eerie sound that caused the hairs on the back of Nisroc’s neck to rise.
Nisroc rarely intervened in the affairs of humans, but something about the deeply sad sound coming from the swaying passenger triggered an urge within him. He stood with her, bending to retrieve the package, taking her arm. She looked up at him and he saw her eyes were dark and haunted. She said softly, “Take me home.”
“All right.”
He helped her to a seat and sat next to her. He kept the package in his lap. Other passengers were craning their necks to look at the odd woman, but his disapproving frown caused them to turn around.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
She seemed not to have heard him. She stared ahead of her silently.
He sat and waited, watching as passenger after passenger stepped off the streetcar at regulated stops. Finally, at the end of the line, the woman stood. He followed her to the exit steps and down into the street. It was late afternoon. Magnolia and gardenia blooms scented the air from trees and bushes along the sidewalk. A soft breeze ruffled Nisroc’s long blond hair. He looked at the woman, who now stood still, wondering what he was doing.
She turned abruptly, as if just now remembering where she was, and strode away. Nisroc followed, swinging the package by the twine wrapped around it. Now he was intrigued. The woman was obviously mad. He just wanted to see what she would do.
After two blocks, the woman turned into a small courtyard and crossed to a recessed door. It was not locked. She entered, ignoring her companion. Nisroc followed, and was about to ask what she wanted done with the package when the two of them moved from a shadowed hallway into an open shadowy room. Nisroc paused on the threshold, frozen by what he saw.
A thin line of afternoon light cut across the room from between heavy, velvet curtains. The weak light fell across a man’s battered body lying on the carpet of what appeared to be a parlour room. Beside him lay a bloodied, ornate iron poker from the cold fireplace.
“I killed him,” the woman said. “He beat me all the time. So I killed him.”
Nisroc had seen murder, had committed murder, and had been murdered as Caesar. Yet this scene struck a resounding chord that resonated throughout his being. It not only reminded him of one of his own earthly deaths, thus thrusting him back into the long, dead silence of the void, but this death seemed to summarize the great difference between man and angel.
A quarrel had created this death, a rising resentment against mistreatment. A product of revenge—that was this man’s reason for losing his life—and of course it was as good as any other.
“I can’t judge you,” he said. “I don’t think I can help you, either.”
“You can hand me the package.” She reached out to take it from him.
He stood as she unwrapped the package, talking as she did so.
“I need to thank you for your help. If you hadn’t taken my arm on the streetcar, I think I would have jumped off it and rolled beneath the wheels. I’ve damned myself in this life and the hereafter. And I don’t…I don’t care.”
She had the package open and withdrew a beautiful cloth that shimmered in the low light. “A shroud,” she explained, standing to drape it over the corpse. “I had to go into the city to get him a shroud. I had nothing here large enough.”
She stooped to roll and tuck the body inside the cloth. When she stood again, she faced him.
“Now you can take him away.”
Nisroc did not move. “Take him away?”
“From here. Take him away and hide him so he will never be found. I can say he left me, he left this house, this city, and he won’t be back. It happens to women all the time. Men go west, looking for gold, looking for a better life, and never return.”
The next moments would determine the course of events, Nisroc knew that. If he did as he was bidden, he would be connected to this woman for whatever came next. If he turned his back on this scene and walked away he could go back to his life as Angelique’s partner.
The woman came close to him. “I am not beautiful,” she said.
He shook his head to deny her words for she was indeed a beautiful woman. Her hair, the color of midnight, was piled high on her head. Her skin was milk and her eyes were dead pools of darkness. Her lips were naturally red and full. Her body, though not young, was ripe and she had an hour glass shape beneath the long sweeping dress.
“No, I am not beautiful, but I am loyal. For help with this,” she gestured to the wrapped body. “I can be your friend…or whatever you want me to be. As long as a hand is not raised to me, I might even become sane again, though I can’t promise that.”
Had she smiled, he might have left immediately, but he briefly read her thoughts and found them entirely open and true. So he put his hands on her shoulders, moved her aside gently, and scooped the dead man into his arms. He had not had a woman since he had come back into the world. He suppressed those urges knowing it was the body that ached and he was more than body. When he spied a woman and fell for her looks, he always turned away and made his mind blank. Trafficking with a woman in that way could be full of trouble and of woe. He had learned that during his last incarnation.
He could have anything he wanted, anything his appetite hungered for, but did he really want this?
“I’ll be back,” he said, again not thoroughly understanding why he was getting himself involved.
“And I’ll be waiting,” she said as he disappeared into the hall and out the door.
#
Angelique did not worry about Nisroc’s disappearances. She knew he had a lot of work to do on their joint financial concerns. She also knew he was a grown man, living in an adult human body, suffused and overcome by all the human passions. She didn't know if he went with women, but she knew it was natural and no cause for alarm or jealousy if he did.
Yet lately she missed Nisroc more often, noticed his absences more keenly, and suspected he had fallen into the clutches of a female human unlike any he had fraternized with before. She could read his mind and discover how serious the relationship might be, but he always knew when she intruded into his thoughts and he despised it. To keep everything on an even keel she rarely took advantage of him that way.
“Who is she?” Angelique finally asked toward the end of summer.
Nisroc sat reading a leather bound volume, his legs stretched out before him. They had just had dinner served to them on trays. Angelique now picked at the last of the little honey-cooked eyes of carrots on her plate.
Nisroc closed the book and placed it in his lap. “She’s no one.”
“She’s someone. You’ve gone missing too often for her to be like the others.”
“There have been no others.” He shrugged, unwilling to share more information with Angelique.
“Well, now there is one and you know what will happen. She’ll grow old and die.”
Nisroc looked up from where he’d been contemplating the quality of the leather on the book in his lap. “I know.”
“You think you can feel love, is that it?”
“I think I can.”
Angelique knocked the tray of food to the floor and rose straight into the air, her little feet dangling free. Her face was twisted with
anger and revulsion. It was as ugly as some kind of strange, alien bug.
“Oh, Angelique,” Nisroc said. “These displays are beneath you.” He sighed and looked away from her dangling body.
She was instantly across the distance between them, snatching the book from his lap. She threw it across the room where it hit the wall. She slapped Nisroc’s face and the sound was like a shot in the quiet room. “Don’t be impertinent.”
He showed no emotion. As his cheek reddened, he stared steadily into Angelique’s eyes. “So will you kill me now?”
“I could!” She dropped to the floor in front of him, placing her hands on her hips.
“You could.” He nodded, still holding her gaze.
“Why are you trying me?”
Nisroc took a few beats to answer. His voice was cold and solemn. “I spent two thousand years longer in the outer darkness than you did, Angelique. I’m not saying I want to go back, but…”
“But what?”
“But it holds little threat over me. If I have no freedom of will at all on this planet, then I prefer you dispatch me now and bring down someone else. I won’t live as your puppet.”
Angelique stepped back in surprise. It was as if a tiger had refused to obey and instead loped off to chase a rabbit. It was as if a cowed dog decided to snap at her hand.
“You’d rather…”
He said, “I’d rather give up this life with you than live it as I have all this time. Yes, I’d rather.”
Perplexed at this turn of affairs, Angelique frowned. Her mind was in such turmoil she could not think straight. She studied Nisroc’s face. His gaze never wavered and there was no fear in his eyes.
Nisroc rose, pushing her back out of the way. “You must surely have tired of having a slave companion by now,” he said.
“I…”
“I may not be your equal, Angelique, but I am an individual with free will. You’ve taken that from me in return for this earthly existence, but I did meet a woman who I spend time with, and if you want me to give her up, then I give you up, too. I give up this barren reality. It has become really no different from the empty void you brought me from.”
He turned his head and stretched out his neck as if to offer it to her. She could dispatch him with one blow despite her childlike size. He would not fight this angel, but he would break her mastery over him if it was the last thing he did.
When she did not move to strike him a death blow, he relaxed and returned his gaze to her. “If I stay, I’ll not be questioned,” he said. “You must leave me alone.”
Angelique spit to the side and stalked away. “Do whatever you want, I don’t care. Have your woman, who cares. She’ll die one day and that will be that.”
He knew that she did care, and deeply, but now was not the time she would do anything about it.
And, of course, she was right. Mary Bartoni Harper would die. One day she would succumb and he hated the very idea. She was human, frightfully human, and she would age while he would not. Eventually he would lose her to death, as nature intended, as the creator decreed.
While Angelique still had her back to him, Nisroc left the room and the house, taking the streetcar through the cool night, his mind focused on the woman who he was obsessed with. His Mary.
His love.
CHAPTER 17
LOVE AND REMORSE
How he came to know love was beyond all understanding. As a fallen angel he thought he had been not only separated from his creator, but from the grace that allowed love to exist.
He began to question what sort of being he was. Angelique thought he was merely enamored of a human female on a purely physical level. What she did not know, could hardly even comprehend, was how his attraction to Mary had changed and was as real and human in scope as any man felt who had loved any woman.
He could not, of course--or yet--tell Mary the complicated tale of his life. She knew about Angelique and thought the child Nisroc’s own. She thought him a widower. She thought him a normal man.
She would have to know the truth, but not for a while. When gray tinged her hair, when wrinkles stole her beauty, when muscles deteriorated, when desire evaporated, when the days moved close to the end of life--she would look on him, a young man, and know he was unnatural.
Until she had questions, he was determined to live a life with her that was as close to human as possible. Why cause her pain or confusion until he had to?
Now as he walked from the steetcar stop to her house, he straightened his tie and shot his cuffs from the sleeves of his navy blue jacket, ran a hand through his unruly hair, and put a smile on his face. He might not feel as settled as he looked, but he knew the pretense would pass a cursory examination.
“Nick!” she cried when she opened the door to him. He had not told her the name Angelique knew him by, his angel name. He had shortened it to Nick.
“Mary,” he breathed, taking her into his arms and burying his face in her fragrant neck. She smelled of spring violets, of mountain streams, and rain clouds tumbling over mountaintops. Her flesh warmed him. Her acceptance was all he felt he had ever needed. Even the women he had loved in Caesar’s time had never moved him as much as did his Mary.
True, she was not entirely sane. She had periods of unbridled anger, usually turned against herself. She often spoke of a world she inhabited that was nothing like the real world. She spoke of conspiracies, of paranoid scenarios, and feared the dark so much that there were always lights on in her house all through the night. She had told him, “I see his ghost,” meaning her dead husband’s shade. She feared retaliation from beyond the veil of death no matter how he tried to assure her those fears were unfounded.
Despite the frailties of her mind, she was vulnerable, open, and real. She displayed no pretenses, held no regrets, entertained no jealousies or envies. She was as open as a book to him and what a fascinating, complicated being she was.
She also loved him with a fierceness that shook him to the core. He knew she would die for him. She had made him her one and only god.
In the bedroom, Mary undressed slowly, knowing he watched. She slipped the gray satin dress from her shoulders and let it fall. He undid her corset for her and when she removed it, her breasts jiggled loose, the nipples stiffening. She slipped from the bloomers and, finally naked, walked to him where he sat clothed on the bed. The line along her spine and over her full buttocks was like an S-curve that made him want to reach out and touch her, taste her…consume her.
“I am not beautiful,” she said.
It was her mantra. “You are,” he said, taking her onto his lap.
“But I love you.”
“And I you.”
She tucked her head into the crook of his neck and sighed happily. “Oh, Nick, you do love me, don’t you? You’re not lying? You’re not sorry for me?”
He was sorry for her, yes, but this was not something he would ever tell. “I just love you,” he said. “You’re the most majestic, thrilling, intelligent woman in the world.”
She giggled and he smiled. She loved hyperbole. It was a sort of game between them. How outrageous could their love be? How fantastic could they express it?
After all, she was not a sane human being, and he was no human being at all. They made the perfect couple.
CHAPTER 18
THE BREAK WIDENS
In the 1930s Angelique instituted human sacrifice in her voodoo rituals. She had to. She needed bodies for her band of angels to inhabit. Her little religious followers had always sacrificed animals, but remembering how she solidified her power over the tribes in Haiti, Angelique knew she must involve her people in the lowest crimes in order to spread the guilt. Guilty people did not argue. Guilty people were as tied to her as if there was an umbilical cord between them. They could never again be entirely free.
“Come with me tonight to the bayou,” she said sweetly to Nisroc. These days he liked to be called “Nick” and that was all right with her. It was a more modern name. It fit h
im better for the times.
“You know I don’t care for those rituals,” he said. He was reading again, ignoring her.
“I insist.”
His gaze rose at the tone of her voice. “You’re commanding me?”
“I have something to show you.”
He put down the book. “All right. Let me change.”
They went into the clammy night, holding hands. A stranger seeing them would think it was a father going for an evening walk with his daughter. In reality it was Angelique hauling him along the sidewalk to the garage where they had a car.
“I hate driving,” he said.
“It’s a long way. We have to drive.”
After they had left the city, the lights dimmed behind them and he could see the moon and stars. “How far is it?”
“Not far now. Take that dirt road to the right up ahead.”
The road narrowed, trees crowded in on each side, and the moonlight disappeared. They came to a clearing where Nick stopped the car. He could smell the fecund earth, the clean tangy scent of turpentine from the pine trees, and beneath it all, the faint smell of stagnant water.
“We’re here.” Angelique stepped out of the car.
Nick saw a group of people, a bonfire, and smoke spiraling into the night sky. He shut off the car and went to join them. He cared very little for Angelique’s voodoo nonsense and the strange dark people she drew to her with it, but she had insisted so…
He was almost to the bonfire before he saw her.
Mary.
He halted, rooted to the spot. He gasped. Mary lay naked and spread-eagled on the bare dirt, her legs and arms tied to stakes driven into the ground. Mary’s eyes were wild and it was obvious what little sanity she enjoyed had now been wiped away.
Nick found himself rising from the ground. The people all stopped what they were doing to stare. His anger was a palpable thing, a whirlwind, a flood, a wall of fire reaching into the sky.
Below him Angelique said, “Stop it.”
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