Banished

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Nick knew something was about to happen. These boys in the store were up to no good; they were up to murder. And Dodge was working the produce on the last aisle, the direction the boys were headed. He could not let them harm Dodge. Dodge was one of the pure souls, also few on the earth, that Nick had ever met. The thought of him being in imminent danger made Nick’s insides quake. He could feel the skin and muscles of his back expand and contract. It was the itch and the strain of wings, black wings, the wings of a Fallen One ready to wreak havoc, ready and willing to bring down Hell and Damnation.

  Nick turned the corner of the aisle just in time to see Dodge pushed up against the vegetable bins, his face screwed up like the mechanism on a wind-up toy. He was a man in the throes of several emotions vying for predominance--startlement, anger, confusion, and a fleeting shadow of fear he couldn’t conceal.

  The evil boy had Dodge by the shirt front, pushing at him, and the other boy held onto one of his arms. There was a gun pointed to Dodge’s cheek.

  Nick roared. He didn’t think about it, didn’t plan it, didn’t know he was even doing it, but a roar came from his wide open mouth and it sounded like two words running together, “DODDDGGENOOOOOO!”

  The kid pulled the trigger and the left side of Dodge’s head blew out in a red spray of brains and blood, covering yellow squash and green heads of cabbage. Dodge slumped toward the floor, his life gone. The kid who shot him let him go and was running away, the other boy behind him shouting for him to wait, wait, wait for me!

  Nick couldn’t move. He was paralyzed with the pain of loss, with disgust at humanity, with a sudden stab to his heart. He had seen death, had even witnessed murder, but this was someone who did not, in any way, deserve his fate. This was a travesty, a loss on a grand scale for the universe.

  On a dark starry night, with nothing more pressing in Dodge’s thoughts than how to make the squash display look beautiful, an evil, out-of-control boy walked up and blew Dodge’s brains out. That wasn't right. In no universe and in no galaxy was that right.

  Now Nick moved. Anger overcame astonishment and Nick was flying down the aisle after the killers. He knew there was nothing he could do for Dodge anymore, nothing. Dodge was no longer among the living.

  The cashier was screaming as Nick passed her, but the sound was muffled and far away in Nick’s ears. The roar he had made now came from inside his brain, drowning out half the world. He hit the door, slamming it so hard it hit the inside wall and glass shattered. On the sidewalk, Nick paused only a second. He saw the two figures dressed in brown duster coats rushing across the street, heading for an alleyway.

  Now was the time for wings. Now was the time of destruction and vengeance. The great black appendages tore cloth, rending it in tattered shreds as if reflecting their owner's fury. The tips rose, the black, shiny feathers spread, ruffling in the wind, and Nick rose from the ground in flight. He caught both boys at the mouth of the alley, taking them each by the scruff of the neck, and hauling them, feet dragging, screaming, toward the darkness between the retail buildings. He slammed them forward, letting go, and they careened headlong into a red brick wall, shadows swallowing them, the night sucking their fearful cries into silence.

  Nick set down on his feet. His wings folded. He was formidable, his visage from a horror magazine—brows furrowed, eyes ablaze, lips held hard in a straight unforgiving line. He stood looking at the boy who had pulled the trigger. The gun was no where in sight. He might have dropped it or stuffed it in the pocket of his large brown coat. “Why did you do that?” Nick asked, his voice like doom come calling.

  The boy tried to get his breath and arrange his senses. Blood spilled down his forehead into his dark eyes. He looked quickly at his companion and saw the other boy was unconscious…or dead.

  “WHY DID YOU DO THAT?” Nick shouted. The brick walls reverberated with his rage.

  “He said he wouldn't open the safe…”

  “Your heart, a dead thing, is mine, boy. You have two minutes to make your peace before you are sent to Hell. Dodge was a good man, a young man just beginning to live his life, and you came along and took that life away. Now what do you have to say for yourself, you viper, you belly-crawling reptile?”

  “He said…he said he wouldn’t open it. He said…he said he loved his job and he wouldn’t do it.”

  “So you shot him. Pulled the trigger and blew away a man worth a thousand of you, killed his good, pure heart, emptied his innocent brain, dropped him into the netherworld without a thought.”

  “I…I…”

  The boy could not get over his stuttering and as Nick approached, now lifting and again spreading his wings, silence filled the alley.

  Though the boy could not utter a sound, his eyes now filled with a fury of his own and Nick recognized it. It was fury over the unfairness of his life, of lost opportunities, of missed chances and untasted desires. It was defiant and without regret. The boy’s mouth widened into a grimacing smile, the smile of a clown, the smile of a man who knows he is dead but he just hasn’t stopped breathing yet. “Fuck you,” the boy said and spit toward Nick. “I wanna die anyway, you monster, you demon, you devil! Come and get me!”

  And Nick did as he was told. He reached down and snapped the boy’s neck like breaking the neck of a chicken. He then flung the boy across the alley, smashing his limp body into the opposite wall.

  Nick was breathing hard and found tears on his face. He had not cried since he had lost his beloved wife. He didn’t know there were so many tears in him and that living in this human form allowed him to feel such immense grief that it was like a tsunami of an order beyond understanding. It threatened to engulf and consume him.

  He backed away, leaving the second boy in the alley. He’d direct the police to him, saying he saw them flee into the alley, let the law deal with his crime. They would wonder what happened to the other boy, the dead one, but there were no witnesses to tell what happened. It would end as a mystery, the same as the reason two crazy kids might march into a late night grocery and in cold blood murder Dodge Carter for refusing to open a safe.

  Nick cleaned the dampness from his cheeks, wiped his hands on his jeans. His wings were already gone, disappearing into his back. He tore off his shredded shirt and balled it in a fist. He walked the few blocks to his rooming house, slipped inside without anyone noticing, put on a new shirt similar to the one he’d been wearing, and left again like an invisible ghost.

  He was back at the store before the cops showed up. When they came through the door he was cuddling the cashier, Vivian, close to his chest, patting her back, and whispering words of encouragement. She wouldn’t remember he had chased the criminals from the store and only returned scant minutes before authorities arrived. She could only remember the gunshot and, once the boys left, running from her cash register to where she’d heard the sound, seeing poor Dodge slumped on the floor, bleeding and wide-eyed in a pose of violent death.

  #

  Nick left Phoenix two weeks later. Dodge's loss left such an emptiness inside him he couldn't even work at the grocery anymore. He cashed his paycheck, said his good-byes, and bought a bus ticket north. He might go to Montana. He might go to Canada. His bus ticket was stamped for Salt Lake City, Utah, but that might not be his final destination. He had to put space between himself and the town where his friend Dodge died, just as he’d had to leave the town and the state where his wife died. Their ghosts did not linger, but his love for them did, and it haunted him with their voices and, now and again, glimpses of people he thought must be his wife, his friend, but turned out not to be anyone he knew, after all.

  As he rode the bus, the windows down, the desert air a thrilling tangle of sage and sun-baked palo verde trees and blooming cacti, he tried not to think about anything. Not his future. Not where he was going. Not heaven and not hell. His mind, when he wanted it to be, was as empty as the moon. He had trained it to be that way after so many thousands of years in limbo, in the vast cold void where life did
not exist and even the hope of life was but a tiny ember in the far distance.

  Chapter 23

  ANGELIQUE IN PURSUIT

  It seemed to take forever to find someone Nick had talked with recently. Angelique trudged down a lonely paved road, her head hanging. Sweat dripped from her temples, running in rivulets down her cheeks and into the hollow under her chin. She was concentrating--concentrating so hard she almost missed the house off the road with the bottle tree in the yard.

  A buzzing set up in her brain like an angry wasp trapped trying to escape an enclosure. She knew something was near, some place where Nisroc had been, where he had walked. He had stayed a while because she picked up his scent and his vibrations. The air twanged with multiple shivering notes, indication of another angel nearby, or one who had stayed here a while.

  Her head jerked up and swiveled on her neck. She had halted in her tracks, feet frozen to the highway. She saw the house, the lone tree with colored bottles gently swaying in a breeze.

  She walked purposefully, shoulders back, gaze steady on the screen door of the ramshackle house. Before she ever got to the steps leading to the porch an old woman came to the door, standing in shadow, watching her approach.

  Oh, this one is gifted, Angelique thought. I don’t know her gift, but she has one. She knew I was coming. It was as if the old woman expected her. Not just a stranger, but her specifically.

  Angelique stopped before the steps, looking up. There was no point in dissimulation. “Nick was here,” she stated.

  The old woman didn’t even blink, neither did she reply. She stood quietly, watching the little girl in her yard.

  Angelique went up the steps leaping as she did so, putting her squarely before the door in mere seconds. She put her hands on the screen. “There’s no point in ignoring me. I’ll find out what I want whether you want me to or not. You know that, don’t you?”

  The old woman wet her lower lip with her tongue. She said, “You’re an angel, too. But not like him. You’re black as a deep hole in the earth. You're dark as swamp water.”

  “Soothsayer, you. I’m not impressed. Many of you humans possess these skills and most of you haven’t a clue how they can help you. So I’m black, am I?” Angelique reached for the door handle and opened the screen door. The woman stepped back, but Angelique had to give her credit for being so cool and collected. She did not look away or tremble before an angel she felt was as evil as an endless hole through the crust of the world.

  “I ask you politely one more time. I won’t ask again because you’ll tell me while you’re screaming for death. Now. Where did he go?”

  The old woman set her lips in a straight line and it was just as effective a gesture as if she’d put her hands over her mouth.

  Angelique cocked her head. “He told you something. Some hint. Didn’t he?”

  The woman shook her head slowly.

  “We’ll see. We’ll just see.”

  Angelique lifted off the floor and began to spin, creating a small whirlwind inside the house. Tin pots flew off the stove top, salt and pepper shakers fell over on the table in the center of the floor, curtains flapped and tangled at the windows.

  The woman moved back several feet and reached for a Louisville Slugger she’d found in a trash bin in Harletsville, where she did her shopping. The bat burst into flame and she dropped it, crying out.

  Angelique ceased turning and dropped to the floor. She raised her right arm and pointed at the woman. “You’re suffocating, old woman. You can’t breathe. Your throat is closing off air to your lungs. You’re going to die just as surely as you would if you were drowning.”

  Response was immediate. The woman’s hands flew to her throat and she arched her head back. Angelique watched as her victim twisted and turned her head, clawed at her throat, watched as eyes bulged and the skin of the woman’s face grew taut and changed to the color of bruised fruit. Finally the woman fell to her knees, hands on the floor, head hanging, and she was in an agony to draw breath into her body.

  “I told you,” Angelique said, softly. “You should cooperate when an ANGEL speaks to you.”

  Minutes later, after horrible struggle, Angelique stood over the unconscious old woman. She stooped beside her and drew back the curly gray hair to reveal her face. The skin was pinking now that oxygen was flowing again to the body. It would be a little while before she came to herself, but she would be all right. She might not be all right during the next session, but that was yet to be seen.

  Angelique stood and glanced around the small room. There were just two rooms in the house, this one and through an open door a bedroom. Angelique wrinkled her nose at the idea there must be an outhouse since there was no bathroom in the house. What a primitive woman. What a useless, primitive human being living a pointless life alone. She should beg to be delivered from this purgatory.

  Peeking in the bedroom she found the bed made, a coverlet stitched together with many colored cloths spread neatly over the mattress. At the foot of the bed was an old round-topped wooden chest. A small bureau stood in the corner and the old woman’s dresses hung from nails pounded in the wood slats of the wall.

  “Pitiful old thing,” Angelique muttered. “Spiteful old thing.”

  A half-hour later Angelique sat in the kitchen table chair when the woman woke and pushed up from the floor. She turned to stare at the child. “You can kill me, but it won’t do no good,” she said. “I don’t know where he went off to. Maybe West, maybe North. You’re going to have to find him yourself, little devil. I’m no good to your purposes.”

  “Were you useful to Nisroc? Did you tell his fortune, laying his future out by reading the palms of his hands? Is that your true gift, old woman?”

  “I was just company to him, that’s all.”

  Angelique sneered at her, lifting a top lip to show small, white teeth. “Did you know he only exists here because of me? Did you know I got him the body he parades around in as if it were his own? Did you know he’s protected me when necessary, helped me deceive and rob and use humans to my own end? Did you know he’s fallen? Just like me? He’s cast out and will remain cast out no matter how human he thinks he is now.”

  The woman sat up straight, squaring her shoulders. “He told me enough.”

  “But he didn’t tell you he’s an unnatural THING, did he? He didn’t say he was a godless THING, not born of woman.”

  “I already knew that.”

  Angelique jumped to her feet, fists balled at her sides. “And you know more, I know you do! You think you can keep any secrets from me? You can’t!”

  “You might as well tear out my tongue because it won’t be used to tell you one word that will help you track down that helpless angel I hosted in my home. He may be godless, but he’s no devil like you.”

  This speech infuriated Angelique to the point that she lost control. She reached out both hands in the air and caused the woman’s head to turn left. Left again. And once more. The head kept turning, twisting on the neck stem. The woman screamed, but she didn’t beg. Her last words before her neck snapped were OH GOD and then she was dead, flopping back to the floor like a rag doll.

  It made Angelique sick to her stomach. She hadn’t meant to take this woman’s life so quickly. She’d been prodded to it and realized that was the old woman’s intent—to have it over fast, to die swiftly, without torture first. “Damn you,” she whispered. The house seemed to settle around the little girl and the lifeless body on the floor. Shadows crept in through the door. It was evening, nearing twilight. She could see the black dog on the porch, lying with its head on crossed paws, watching her.

  Angelique sat back down into the chair and rubbed her face with her hands. She needed to find something to eat. She needed to sleep in the bed, get some rest.

  Tomorrow she’d be off again, wandering the highways, looking for her partner angel. And she’d have to do it without any help from the old woman at her feet.

  “Spiteful old thing!” she shouted.
>
  A wind came up and shook the bottles in the tree in the yard, the tinkle of glass setting up a cacophony of crazy sounds. Angelique looked out the door at the tree and sighed. If that noise didn’t stop she would never get any sleep.

  Maybe she’d go out and knock down all the bottles first, before it got dark. The old woman wouldn’t like that and maybe that was reason enough to do it.

  She walked past the body, giving it a glance, imaging one of the limp hands coming to life to reach out for her ankle. But of course that didn’t happen and it wouldn’t. As much magic as the old woman had, it hadn’t been enough to save her from death and death was final. At least to a true human, it was.

  While the sky darkened and the doves gathered in the high grass to make their mournful sounds, Angelique worked on the tree untying string and cords, untangling wires, bottles dropping like dead butterflies to the ground. The dog kept a distance, watching, always watching. Finally in the full dark she worked, muttering, sometimes weeping with frustration and self-pity.

  It was midnight before she was done and could clamber down from the tree branches. She was really hungry and tired, but she had one more chore to do before looking for food. She had to drag the body out of the house. She’d let it lie amidst the bottles, broken and soundless, beneath the tree. It was a good resting place for her, the perfect place.

  A bad yellow moon rose low in the sky as Angelique wearily tread the steps to the porch and entered the house. Wind whispered against the eaves and whistled around the house corners.

  It was the night of the dead witch. It was a lonely patch of land with a soulless house harboring a tired child who had been called a devil. The dark would not be kind.