“Shoo,” he said, but the deity didn’t move. He thought about opening the garage door so it could leave, but he was afraid the Wyatts might see it. He settled for taking his Scotch and leaving the garage. He locked the door behind himself. He wondered which had happened first, the real tree falling or the model tree falling.
The city sent out a crew within the hour to chop the tree into small pieces. They loaded the pieces into a long truck and covered the Wyatts’ roof in a blue tarp. Albee watched the whole thing from the window of the guest bedroom upstairs. When the city workers drove away, Albee dropped onto the bed without taking his clothes off. He’d had several more Scotches by this point. Before he fell asleep, he heard Church come up the stairs and pass by the bedroom. She paused at the door to the boy’s room, as she did every night. She had once suggested they take everything out of the room and put it into storage.
“We could paint it,” she had said. “Make it a guest room.”
“Who would visit us?” Albee had asked.
It was that same day that he had gone out and bought everything for his model neighbourhood. He didn’t know why. He’d sometimes played miniatures with the boy. Dwarves and orcs and that sort of thing. He told himself his models were different, although he wasn’t sure exactly what they meant.
Sometimes Church lay down on the boy’s bed when Albee wasn’t around, when he was out parked in the abandoned Avalon neighbourhood, dreaming of other lives. He knew she did so because he could see the outline of her body on the boy’s sheets when he returned home. She never asked him where he was, so he didn’t say anything about that.
When he thought about the boy, he wanted to weep. He closed his eyes as he lay there on the bed, to hold the tears in. He tried to imagine what the boy would have looked like now, but he couldn’t even remember what he had looked like back then.
Church moved on, to the bedroom they had once shared on the other side of the boy’s room. Albee fell asleep wishing he could see the boy one more time. He dreamed of the neighbourhood in flames. He was standing in the street, looking at the burning houses. He had a sense of something terrible coming down the street behind him, but he couldn’t bear to turn around and face it. Maybe the dream was because of the smell of smoke in the air. Maybe it was something else.
He woke in the morning to the smell of coffee. When he went down to the kitchen, he found Church had already poured him a cup and made a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her own coffee, staring at the deity perched on top of the fridge. Albee looked at the deity himself as he reheated his meal in the microwave. He didn’t know if Church had let it out of the garage or if it had got out on its own. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“I think I’ll take it out into the yard,” she said. “It looks like it could use some sun.”
“It’s a deity, not a plant,” Albee said.
“Everything needs the sun.”
“I don’t want the neighbours to see it.”
“Maybe they all have deities, too,” Church said. “Maybe they’re hiding their deities away. Maybe I’ll bring our deity out and that will be all they need to bring their deities out. Maybe we’ll have a block full of deities.”
Albee went to the front door and grabbed the keys from the dish there without taking his breakfast out of the microwave.
“Where are you going?” Church asked.
“I’m going to find those deity salesmen.”
“But we haven’t even finished our trial period yet.”
“Do you really think that’s how it works?” Albee asked, walking out the door.
“Everything has a trial period,” Church called after him. “I thought you of all people would understand that.”
Albee drove down the street and around the corner. He kept on driving, until he found himself in the abandoned Avalon neighbourhood. He parked in front of a lot that held just a billboard of a home. The picture on the billboard was faded from the weather and peeling, but Albee could still make out the shape of the house, the ghostlike forms of the children playing on the lawn while a man barbecued and a woman gazed at the sky and laughed. He looked around but didn’t see a home like that anywhere. He didn’t see any travelling deity salesmen, either. He put the car back into drive and kept going.
He went through all the surrounding neighbourhoods but he couldn’t find the deity salesmen. He’d known they wouldn’t come back. Albee and Church were stuck with the deity. He didn’t want it even if it was free. There was always a cost with deities. He was starting to understand that now.
He stopped at a red light by the grocery store. There were no other cars and no pedestrians waiting to cross. It was just a random red light. He sat there and looked out the window while he waited. A plane flew through the sky overhead, trailing a banner behind it.
Problem Deity Hotline, it said, followed by a phone number. Albee took it as a sign, because what else could it be? He memorized the number and then drove on when the light turned green.
He returned home around noon. The plane was gone from the sky now, likely because the churning clouds were back. They blocked out the sun and looked like they were about to fall on the neighbourhood. That wasn’t the only thing. All the trees on the street had died. Piles of leaves sat on the ground around them, the wind of Albee’s car stirring them up as he passed. He was so busy staring at them he almost missed his house as he approached. He looked down at the last second, just in time to see the boy run out into the street toward him.
Albee swerved to avoid hitting the boy, even as a part of his mind screamed at him that the boy wasn’t there, that the boy couldn’t be there. The other part of his mind watched with shocked resignation as the car bounced up over the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, the impact knocking his hands free of the steering wheel. The car drove into the front of the Wellingtons’ house, smashing through the front windows and into the living room before jerking to a sudden stop that set off the airbags. That’s the way Albee remembered it, anyway. Because one second he was driving along the street, looking at the strange clouds and the dead trees, and the next second he was staring through the windshield at Linda Wellington, who was cowering on her couch, screaming and hitting the front of his car with a pair of binoculars she held in one hand.
“You’ll scratch the paint!” he cried at her, before he realized the absurdity of what he was saying. He got out of the car and stumbled back through the wreckage of the window, toward his house. He looked around the street but he didn’t see the boy, because how could he see the boy? The boy was gone and he wasn’t coming back. He hadn’t been there in the street. Albee had dreamed him.
Almost against his will, Albee looked up at the boy’s window in their house and saw the shape pressed up against the glass there. It wasn’t the boy. It was the deity.
“That’s enough!” he screamed at the deity. “You’ll scratch the paint!”
Church opened the front door just before he reached it. She shook her fist in his face.
“This is what you do?” she yelled at him. “This is what you do when you’re in the garage?”
It took him several seconds to see she held the miniature of the boy in her hand.
“It’s the deity,” he said to her. “The deity is pretending to be the boy.”
She stared down at the miniature in her hand instead of answering. Albee pushed past her and went into the house. He took the stairs two at a time and went up to the boy’s room. But the deity wasn’t there. It was just the boy’s empty room like usual. Albee saw Church’s shape on the boy’s bed.
He went back downstairs and into the garage. The deity wasn’t there, either, but the figure of the deity was back. It was in the boy’s room in the model house. The boy’s room that no longer held the boy.
Albee went back to the front door. Church was still standing there, looking at their car in the living room of the Wellingtons’ house. Linda Wellington had stopped hit
ting the car with her binoculars and had disappeared now. The deity sat on the roof of the car, amid the broken glass and wood that had fallen on the vehicle. It looked back at them with eyes as black and expressionless as ever.
“I don’t understand,” Church said. “You drive this street every day.”
“It was the boy,” Albee said.
Church looked down at the miniature in her hand. Albee didn’t tell her about the night before, about how he had wished he could see the boy one more time. Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out his phone. He called the number he had memorized for the problem deity hotline. It rang twice and then someone answered.
“What’s the nature of your deity?” a woman’s voice asked.
“The boy,” Albee said again because he didn’t know what else to say.
“Don’t worry, we get a lot of this kind of call,” the woman said. “Can you give me your address or the last known address of the deity’s manifestation?”
“Avalon,” Albee said.
“Avalon?” The woman asked.
“The housing development,” Albee said. “The boy.”
Now Church turned to look at him. The deity just kept on staring at him.
“We’ll find it,” the woman said. “We’ll send someone around in the morning.” And then she was gone.
Albee put his phone away and looked up and down the street. The neighbours that were home had come out of their houses now and were looking at their dead trees and the clouds churning overhead and Albee’s car in the Wellingtons’ house and at the deity perched on the roof of the car.
“Who were you talking to?” Church asked.
But Albee didn’t answer. He just went inside and straight up to bed. He pulled the covers over his head without undressing and he stared into the white light of the sheets as he listened to the sirens and voices of the firemen and paramedics and Church talking to the police outside. He waited for morning.
The dawn came with an orange glow through the sheet. Only it wasn’t dawn. When he got up and went to the window, the sky was still dark. The orange glow was on the horizon. Flames leapt up into the sky several blocks over. Albee knew what was burning. The Avalon neighbourhood.
He looked in the boy’s bedroom and saw Church sleeping in the boy’s bed. He went downstairs without waking her.
He didn’t see the deity in the kitchen or the living room, but he heard a sound in the garage for a moment, before the sirens started up in the distance and drowned it out.
It sounded like someone was crying. Like a boy’s sobbing.
Albee went and stood by the door of the garage for a moment. Now he could hear it better. Yes, it was definitely sobbing. It may have been the boy again. He didn’t want to open the door to find out, but he couldn’t help himself.
When he opened the door and stepped into the garage, he found the model neighbourhood on fire. The houses at the end of the street, where Albee took the turn to drive to Avalon, were burning.
The boy wasn’t there but the deity was. The deity was the one sobbing. It stood in the middle of the model street, looking at the burning houses. Its body shook with its sobs, and now it let out a keening sound. It looked at Albee and he was shocked to see black tears filling its eyes and rolling down its misshapen cheeks. It looked down at the neighbourhood and another pair of model homes burst into flames. The fire was coming down the street toward their house.
And now Albee could hear screams outside. The screams of his neighbours.
“What have you done?” he whispered to the deity.
He hit the button on the wall that opened the garage door and stepped out into his driveway. The sky was a mix of orange and charcoal now, as the glow from the fires mixed with the smoke in the air. He turned and saw what was coming down the street toward them.
A flaming angel.
It was twenty or thirty feet tall – Albee couldn’t tell for certain, on account of it being made entirely of flame. It had great burning wings that swept the air, reaching out to the trees and houses it passed and lighting them afire. The entire street was ablaze behind it. Even the pavement burned where it had stepped. Albee could barely look at its face, it burned so bright, but he thought he saw an expression of rage twisting there in the flames.
His neighbours were fleeing their blazing homes behind the angel, screaming as they ran out into the night and saw what had caused the fires. Some of them ran back into their homes, for who knew what. Maybe just to hide. Others got into their cars and drove away, weaving through the flaming footprints of the angel. Still others just stood in the street and stared.
Albee knew why the angel was here. The people from the problem deity hotline had sent it. It was here for their deity.
He turned and looked for the deity in the garage, but it was in the driveway with him now. It stood beside him and reached up to him with one clawed hand. Just like the boy had done when he was little and learning to walk. Albee couldn’t help but take its hand. It felt rough and cold in his, like he was holding hands with a statue.
The angel roared when it saw the deity, and the sound shook the neighbourhood like thunder. Car alarms went off, joining the wail of smoke detectors. The angel’s fires flared up and it expanded, doubling in size. The street was as bright as day.
The angel came at them in a rush. It flowed more than ran across the distance between them. The houses and trees on both sides of it burst into flame. Albee stumbled back into the garage but the deity stepped forward to meet the angel. It pulled its hand from Albee’s and hopped down into the street. It was still sobbing and keening as it went. When it reached the street, it turned to look back at Albee with those black eyes. Then the angel loomed over the deity and its wings swept forward, encircling the deity and engulfing it. The flames of the angel flared so bright that Albee had to look away. He hit the wall several times until he found the button that closed the garage door, but it didn’t work. Albee realized the garage door was burning. He looked down at the model neighbourhood now and saw all the houses burning. Including theirs.
He saw the figure of the boy catch fire in his room. He didn’t know when Church had put him back there but she must have done it at some point. He leaped forward to save him, but the boy melted almost instantly. He disappeared into the flames before Albee could reach him.
Albee looked out into the street and saw the angel turn and go back the way it had come. The pavement burned in a pool in front of their house. The tree in the Wellingtons’ yard burned. The Wellingtons’ house burned. Albee’s car, which was still embedded in the Wellingtons’ living room, burned. There was no sign of the deity. The angel had taken it.
The smoke alarms went off inside the house and Albee snapped his gaze back to the model. The boy’s room was burning now. The boy’s room where Church had been sleeping.
“Church!” Albee cried and ran back into the house. There was smoke everywhere. He met Church as she was coming down the stairs, a wreath of smoke trailing after her.
“The boy’s on fire!” she screamed at him. “The boy’s on fire!” Her hands were red and blistering already from where flames had burned them.
He rushed past her up the stairs, to the boy’s room. He knew the house was lost, but maybe they could save something from the boy’s room. The bed the boy had slept on, or maybe some of his clothes. The photos on the walls. Something, anything.
But the room was entirely ablaze. He couldn’t even get close to it because the walls of the hallway were burning. Great wings of flame leapt out the door of the boy’s bedroom, and Albee knew in an instant that everything was lost.
Church screamed behind him, a high, keening noise that wasn’t unlike the sound the deity had made. Albee turned and caught her hand in his. Together they stumbled down the stairs, through the smoke and flames, their screams merging with the screams of the smoke alarms.
They emerged into what seemed to be the end of the world. Both sides of the street were just walls of flames now, as the house
s and trees and yards burned. The angel had disappeared with the deity, gone back to wherever it had come from. The sky was full of churning smoke from all the fires. There were sirens and alarms in the distance, but he didn’t see any fire trucks or police cars on their street.
Their neighbours were fleeing their homes, running for the ends of the street in either direction. But Albee and Church didn’t try to escape. Instead, they looked back at their house and watched the fire consume it.
They fell into each other’s arms and hung on as the world burned around them, because it was all they had.
You Shall Know Us
BY OUR VENGEANCE
Noir had just finished killing Van Gogh in his bedroom when the angel spoke to him for the first time.
“That was messy,” it said.
It had been a very messy kill, in fact, on account of Noir using a knife on Van Gogh, who hadn’t even been able to get out of his bed. Noir could have used a gun and done the job with one shot. He could have been distant and merciful instead of close-up and cruel. But the Choir had told him to use a knife.
“Make it hurt for a long time,” the Choir had said when they’d called him earlier that night to give him the job. “This contract is all about sending a message.”
So Noir had gone to Van Gogh’s building, which was the tallest residential tower in the city. There were taller commercial towers, but the office towers were always taller. He’d taken the elevator up to Van Gogh’s condo. It wasn’t the penthouse, but it was close enough there wouldn’t be a difference to the average person on the street. Noir had unlocked the lobby door and elevator using a pass he’d bought from another freelancer like himself who specialized in such things. He tried not to look at the mirrored parts of the elevator’s interior. Whenever he caught a glimpse of his own reflection lately, he saw the face of one of his previous victims instead. He took that as a sign it was probably time to get out of this line of work. But he had a few more jobs to do first. Like Van Gogh.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 18
