Dancing On the Head of a Pin rc-2

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

Some of these were dreadful worlds, full of dreadful creatures that would have liked nothing more than to feed upon the flesh of the divine. And through those fearsome worlds Remy traveled, avoiding conflict when he was able, and, if he needed to, vanquishing any challenger that dared try and prevent him from reaching his destination.

  The journey was long and hard, but the promise of what awaited him at the end of this long journey was enough to sustain him.

  In a vast sea of black, waiting for the gentle tug of the world he so longed for, Remy floated, wrapped within his wings of golden brown.

  Fragments of memory that he believed lost rose to the surface of his resting mind. He hadn’t lost them. They were still there, just buried very deep. And as he floated in the darkness of the void, continuing the long journey home, he carefully stirred them to the surface.

  Reacquainting himself with his humanity.

  “So it wasn’t like… a hallucination, since I’d been gut shot and all,” Steven Mulvehill said as he raised his cup of coffee to his mouth, all the while watching him.

  Remy gazed out over the city of Boston from the patio of Massachusetts General Hospital, where the homicide detective was still recovering from his gunshot wound. He almost hadn’t made it.

  Almost.

  “Would you believe me if I told you it was?” Remy asked him.

  Mulvehill barely took a sip of his drink, the intensity of his stare showing that he was seriously thinking about the question, and its answer.

  “No,” he said finally. “Even though I know it doesn’t make a lick of fucking sense, I know what I saw… what I experienced.”

  “I could deny it,” Remy answered. He was watching the birds fly above the city, missing the glorious feel of wind beneath his wings. “Who’s going to believe that you actually saw an angel, other than the truly devout, and some others that have a tendency to skip their meds?”

  Remy tore off a piece of bagel and placed it in his mouth.

  “But you’re not going to?” the detective asked. “Deny it.”

  “Not to you,” he answered, chewing his breakfast. Remy picked up his napkin and wiped stray crumbs from his mouth. “Nope, I made my bed and now I have to lie in it.”

  Mulvehill’s face screwed up. “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean, Plato?”

  Remy laughed.

  “Means that I’ve got to deal with what I’ve done. I showed you what I am, and now we both have to live with it.”

  “You thought I was gonna die, didn’t you?” Mulvehill asked. “You didn’t think you were gonna have to deal with this.”

  Remy shrugged, having some more of his coffee.

  “How many others know… you’re like that?” the detective asked.

  “My wife, my dog, some business associates, but they’ve got some interesting qualities of their own,” Remy answered. He’d finished his coffee and didn’t want any more of the bagel.

  “Do you want the rest of this?” he asked Mulvehill.

  The detective shook his head, turning the wheelchair slightly to look out over the city. They were both quiet, wrapped up in their own thoughts.

  “They say I’ll probably be going home Friday,” Mulvehill said.

  “That’s good, right?” Remy asked him. “You’re ready to go home, aren’t you?”

  The man nodded once, looking back to the angel sitting across from him at the patio table.

  “Yeah,” he said, and paused. Remy could see him reviewing his next words carefully. “But what happens after that?”

  Remy leaned back in the chair, folding his hands on his stomach. “I guess it all depends on how long it takes for you to get back on your feet. After that, you’ll go back to work… light duty at first, slowly working your way back to where you were.”

  Mulvehill leaned in closer to the table so that others wouldn’t hear.

  “You don’t get what I’m talking about,” he said to the angel. “Knowing what I know now… that something like you actually exists… it changes everything.”

  “I guess it does,” Remy agreed. “And for that I’m sorry. I just didn’t want you to be afraid.”

  “I’m afraid now,” Mulvehill said, his gruffness suddenly pulled away like a curtain to reveal a man confronted with the reality of something so much bigger than himself.

  “And here I was thinking I was doing you a favor. The next time you get mortally shot, remind me to look the other way.”

  The detective at first appeared stunned, but as the smile began to form on the angel’s face, the two of them began to laugh.

  The pull on Remy was stronger now, the current that he traveled through the void bringing him closer to his destination. He had no idea how much longer he still had on his journey, or even how long it had been thus far. All he knew was that it was a distance that must be traversed in order to return home.

  Still swaddled within his wings, Remy floated through the void, the memories that continued to rise to the surface making him all the more hungry for the existence he had left behind.

  Somewhere in the darkness the puppy whimpered.

  Not really asleep, but in that weird resting state that he’d eventually learned to put himself in while Madeline slept, Remy rose from bed, careful not to wake his wife, and went in search of the animal.

  It had been only a few days since Marlowe had come to live with them, and the young canine seemed to be adjusting quite well to his new environment.

  Or at least that was what Remy believed.

  He found the pup downstairs, in the corner of the shadowed living room, sitting in a patch of moonlight beneath the open window.

  “What’s wrong?” Remy asked the animal, keeping his voice soft so that he did not awaken his wife.

  “Miss them,” the puppy said, staring at him briefly with large, seemingly bottomless dark eyes, before he turned his snout back up to the breeze wafting in through the window.

  “Who do you miss?” Remy asked him, sitting in the chair not too far from where the Labrador puppy sat. “Your pack brothers and sisters?”

  “Yes.”

  “As you have done, your brothers and sisters have gone to live in new places, Marlowe. With new families,” Remy started to explain. “We are your pack now.”

  The dog looked at him with sad eyes, ears flat against his small, square head. “Not same. Miss them.”

  Remy moved from the chair, and sat beside the animal on the floor beneath the window. “Yes, it’s sad,” he told the puppy. “But that’s the way it works. First there is the pack, and then the pack is broken up, each of you going off to find a new pack.”

  Marlowe crawled up into Remy’s lap, plopping down with a heavy sigh.

  “The way it works?” the Labrador pup asked.

  “Afraid so,” Remy said, beginning to stroke the dog’s short, silky-soft fur.

  “You leave pack?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Find new pack? Happy now… not sad?”

  “No, not sad,” Remy told him, as he gently patted the young dog until he drifted off to sleep.

  “Happy now.”

  He was nearly there.

  Remy could feel it in the sea of dark, just beyond his reach. It was the tug of the familiar, a promise of the warmth and love of companions.

  They were not his kind, but still they had recognized and accepted what he was, and in turn he had made them his own.

  Rousing himself from a sleeplike stasis, Remy spread his wings and listened to his senses, homing in on the place that called out to him.

  The world that was his home.

  They climbed the stairs to the rooftop.

  Madeline carefully pushed the door at the top of the stairway open and stepped out onto what would soon become their rooftop patio.

  She held his hand in hers, drawing him out onto the tar-paper surface for a view of the city beyond Beacon Hill.

  “This will be fantastic,” she said, looking around at the space. A stack of empty and broken clay
flowerpots sat in the corner, along with a punctured bag of potting soil. “We can put the table just about there, with the chairs around it… This is going to be great.”

  She spun around and hugged him tightly.

  “Are you happy?” she asked, her faced pressed to his chest.

  This would be the first night in their new home on Pinckney Street. They had spent the entire day—since early that morning—painting and doing some fixing about the brownstone. The phone man had been there, as had the gas man.

  Remy wrapped his arms around his wife and hugged her close.

  Am I happy?

  Since making this world his home, he’d slowly acclimated himself to the concept. He was a creature of Heaven; there was no time for happiness or the opposite. His existence had been to serve the Almighty.

  He guessed there had been happiness in that, but now he couldn’t truly be sure. The war had taken so much from him, bleached away the colors of what had once been such a glorious rainbow.

  But this world, this earth, had given him back some of the color.

  In retrospect, he saw the happiness had grown. The more acclimated he became, the more human, his joy had increased.

  And it had reached its zenith with the love of his wife.

  “I’m happy,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

  She looked up at him.

  “Really? Are you really?”

  He smiled at her. “What are you getting at?” he asked. “I can hear that sound in your voice. You’re fishing for something.”

  She laughed as she broke away from his embrace, going to the edge of the roof. “I don’t know,” she said, leaning on the brick edging that bordered the roof space. “Sometimes I get to thinking about the reality of what you are, and where you came from.”

  Remy came up from behind, wrapping his arms around her waist, and pressing against her. “I don’t understand what that has to do with…”

  Madeline turned around in his grasp, gazing into his eyes.

  “You’re an angel from the kingdom of Heaven,” she stressed. “Isn’t all this… with me… I don’t know… boring?”

  Remy looked deep into her inquisitive stare as she waited for his answer. She would know whether or not he was lying; it was a gift that she had.

  Slowly he lowered his face down toward her, his lips eventually meeting hers. They kissed softly at first, and more eagerly soon after that.

  Before leaving the roof to descend the stairs to their new home, where they made love on an old down comforter they’d used as a makeshift drop cloth, Remy broke their passion to answer her question.

  “All this… you… this is Heaven,” he told her.

  This is Heaven.

  He emerged from the void into a darkness of a different kind, this one illuminated by a multitude of stars, twinkling in the galaxy like jewels strewn upon a covering of velvet.

  Hanging in space, he found his bearings, moving through the vacuum, at last, toward his destination.

  He had no idea how long he’d been gone, feeling the heart within his chest swelling in size as he beheld the planet he had so come to love hanging there, as if waiting for his return.

  The angelic nature was displeased, attempting to exert dominance, to suppress the humanity that had emerged from hiding as he’d traveled the void toward Earth, growing in size and strength at the joy he had found in the recollections of being human.

  There was nothing the angelic essence would have loved more than to withdraw completely, leaving him frail and unprotected in the killing coldness of space, eager for him to beg to be something more.

  Remy held the reins firmly, controlling the troublesome aspect of his being as he entered the Earth’s atmosphere, the sudden friction of oxygen upon his flesh causing it to heat, threatening to burn. His body beginning to glow white-hot with reentry, he gritted his teeth, spreading his wings wide to help slow his descent.

  The angel dropped out of the night sky unnoticed by the city below, which was as he wished it to be.

  Dropping through a thick bank of clouds, Remy emerged over the city of Boston. A smile appeared on his face and his naked flesh tingled. It had been scoured a bright red as a result of his journey. It would all heal eventually, he thought, flapping his wings furiously, pushing his speed to the maximum in order to return home. He had no idea how long he’d been gone, time moving differently in travels from one realm to the next.

  He just hoped it hadn’t been too long. That he hadn’t been forgotten.

  Remy soared above Faneuil Hall, Government Center, and then the golden dome of the State House on his way to Beacon Hill… to Pinckney Street.

  To his home.

  The rooftop of his building appeared below him, and he was suddenly overtaken with a feeling of absolute exhaustion. He swooped down from the night sky, aiming for the rooftop patio below.

  As his bare feet touched down upon the blacktop, he collapsed, pitching forward, the stinging warmth of his face and body now pressed to the cool tar-paper roof.

  Unconsciousness threatened to take him, but he managed to fight it, not wanting to surrender to the darkness again. He’d spent far too much time in the womb of oblivion, and would prefer not to return there.

  In the distance he heard a noise, growing louder, more persistent as it came closer. It was the barking of a dog—his dog—and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard a sound so beautiful.

  Marlowe was saying hurry, over and over again in the rough voice that he had. And Remy couldn’t have agreed more.

  Hurry.

  He heard the door to the roof open, the distinct voice of his friend speaking to the insistent animal.

  “If these are friggin’ pigeons again, you’re not getting your snack tonight. You think I’m joking? Try me. If you brought me all the way up here in the middle of the freakin’ night again to…”

  Marlowe knew he was there, somehow sensing his arrival.

  He was a good boy, a really good boy.

  The barking turned higher, almost a squeal of pain, as the dog found him. Remy could feel his excited approach. The Labrador pounced and began licking his face, his head, his shoulders, repeating his name over and over again. Remy wanted to sit up, to throw his arms around the neck of his animal friend and tell him how much he was missed, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t even open his eyes.

  “Jesus Christ, Remy,” he heard Mulvehill say. “I thought you were dead. When I got that phone message I didn’t know what to think… I didn’t know if you needed my help… I thought you were dead… ”

  Mulvehill knelt upon the ground, and Remy’s bare skin stung as his body was gently raised, held in the arms of his friend.

  Marlowe had not stopped kissing his face. It felt good, cool and sort of slimy on his tender flesh.

  “Look at you,” Mulvehill said, holding his friend close. There was worry in his voice, and Remy wondered how bad he actually looked.

  “You hang in there, okay?” he said. “You’re going to be fine. It’s my turn now,” Mulvehill said. “There’s no reason to be afraid… Everything is going to be all right.”

  And with those words, Remy managed to crack open his eyes, staring up into the man’s worried face.

  His friend was right, he thought, as he felt his eyes begin to close, eager oblivion rushing in to steal him away from this moment of happiness.

  At the moment, there was no reason to be afraid; everything was going to be all right.

  And as exhaustion threatened to take him, he saw his wife’s beautiful face as she again asked him the question.

  Are you happy?

  And he completely surrendered to the moment, taking her into his arms, the two of them drifting down, down, down into the darkness.

  Yes.

  EPILOGUE

  It had taken him time to heal, the damage far more extensive than he would have originally believed.

  Hell certainly had its dramatic effects; his shoulder still ached where he had been wounded, h
is flesh still peeling in places, the remaining manifestation of his angelic form sloughing off like a snake shedding its skin.

  It itched like hell.

  Remy stood in the foyer of Francis’ building on Newbury Street, listening to the sounds of the empty building. The fallen that had lived here were gone, leaving to go elsewhere when the passageway between this world and Hell was severed.

  It is not such a bad thing, he thought, there being one less entry point from the netherworld, especially now.

  The jingling of Marlowe’s collar distracted him from his musing. The dog was at the end of the hall, sniffing around an old radiator.

  “What did you find?” Remy asked.

  “Mouse smell,” Marlowe said, lifting his head to answer, a large wad of dust sticking to his wet black nose.

  Since Remy’s return, Marlowe had become his shadow, refusing to let him out of his sight. He believed the dog had thought that he had died, leaving him like Madeline had. It would take some convincing, but he was sure that the animal would soon start to relax again.

  Malowe padded down the hallway toward him.

  “Want to get going?” Remy asked him, reaching out to pat his head and wiping away the dust and dirt that still clung to his nose.

  “Park?” the dog asked.

  Remy reviewed his day. It was Saturday, and there really wasn’t all that much planned.

  “Sure, I think we can squeeze in a run to the Common,” he said.

  Marlowe’s tail wagged happily.

  Fishing the building’s keys from his pocket, Remy noticed Marlowe now sniffing around the door that would take them down into what had been Francis’ place.

  “Where Francis?” Marlowe asked with a tilt of his head.

  He really didn’t know how to answer the animal. To tell the Labrador that his friend was dead would have likely been a lie. Francis had been a Guardian angel in service to the Lord God who had betrayed his station by joining Lucifer’s rebellion against Heaven. He had realized the error of his ways, begging the Almighty’s forgiveness, and had been given penance.

  “Francis had to go away,” Remy told the animal.