Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  “The things you see are never unseen even before they are seen by the unseen,” Orpheus said. The edges of Lucien’s vision strobed with light although he didn’t know if it was from Orpheus or the after-effects of the accident. He didn’t want to look back to find out.

  He got out and went to the girl lying in the parking lot. Her arms and legs were bent at angles he knew they shouldn’t have been. Her clothes were so torn from the impact that Lucien couldn’t even see a logo or guess the brand. She was five, maybe six years old. She looked like a scene from some sort of activist video.

  Kia stumbled to his side and fell to her knees as she looked at the girl. She was still hanging on to Orpheus’s hand. He floated upside down above her like a balloon. “It was an accident,” she said.

  “Yes,” Lucien said, although he wasn’t certain of that. He wasn’t sure if he’d been blinded by the spots in his vision or if he was just making that up after the fact. He thought it was entirely possible he’d seen her and kept driving anyway. He didn’t know what to believe.

  “Does it still count if it was an accident?” Kia asked, and Lucien knew she was talking about what the sorcerer had told him.

  But they both saw the girl was still breathing from the pink bubbles that formed on her lips.

  Lucien looked around and saw the children in the playground gathering by the fence and staring at them. Miss Edge was standing in the middle of the parking lot screaming into her phone. They didn’t have much time. He looked up and didn’t see the angel in the sky anywhere. Just Orpheus drifting back and forth above them.

  “Oh God oh God oh God,” Kia said. She smoothed the girl’s hair and then put her hand over the girl’s face. Over her nose and mouth.

  “Mommy,” the girl said through Kia’s hand.

  “I can’t,” Kia said, moving her hand to stroke the girl’s cheek. “Oh my God, I can’t, I’m so sorry, I can’t.” She began to weep now.

  Lucien slipped his hand around the girl’s throat. Her skin was hot to the touch. He knew all he had to do was squeeze. No one would ever see it but him and Kia. Miss Edge and the children would just think he was trying to help. Her crushed throat would just look like more damage from the accident. Because he knew he could say it was an accident. The girl had run out from between the cars, after all. He knew that even if she didn’t die, she was badly hurt. Her spine was probably damaged, and maybe her brain. Who knew what kind of life lay ahead of her? The best-case scenario for her now was likely to become a poster child for some charity. But he could still save Orpheus.

  He felt the girl’s pulse flutter against his fingers, and he knew in that moment he couldn’t do it. He remembered the first ultrasound where they’d been able to hear Orpheus’s heartbeat. He thought about the girl’s parents listening to their own ultrasound heartbeat. He thought about them somewhere out there in the world, perhaps preparing at this very moment to come and pick up the girl from school later. They would ask her how her day had been, what she’d learned, who she’d played with. They’d go to bed thinking about what kind of person she’d be in later life. Perhaps they’d think of grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren.

  He felt the girl’s heartbeat again and pulled his hand away. He looked up at the sky but the angel was long gone. It was like it had never been there at all.

  The police arrived a minute later. It was the same pair of cops that had stopped them earlier. The man pulled them away from the girl and made them sit on the ground behind the Range Rover. The woman kneeled by the girl’s side and said words to her that Lucien couldn’t hear.

  “If she dies, the light is going to be the least of your problems,” the male cop said to Lucien.

  “Don’t you even want to take our statements?” Lucien asked.

  “I don’t need your statement to know what happened here,” the cop said.

  Lucien understood in that moment the cop knew all about what the sorcerer had told them, and what they’d been thinking when they had come here.

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  “That’s what they always say,” the cop said.

  The paramedics arrived a few minutes after that, followed by the firefighters and more cops. There were vehicles with flashing lights and sirens everywhere. The men and women in uniforms all clustered around the girl but they kept glancing at Lucien and Kia sitting on the ground, and Orpheus floating above them, his mother his only tether to the earth. The paramedics called in a helicopter and it came with a sound like it was tearing the sky open. It landed in an empty part of the parking lot, and the wind from it blew Orpheus about so much that Kia almost lost her grip on him. She cried out and hung on with two hands now. The paramedics wheeled the girl to the helicopter on a stretcher. They loaded her inside and the helicopter took off again, rising up into the sky and flying away in the same direction the angel had disappeared.

  After it was gone, the firefighters and paramedics and cops all left, too. The ones that had been first on the scene were the last to go. The woman cop got back in their car while the man looked at Lucien and Kia.

  “I can’t tell if you’re at risk of more accidents,” he said.

  “We just want to go home and hold our boy,” Kia said.

  “Where were you when the angel broke into our house and infected our son?” Lucien asked. “What are you going to do about the angels?”

  The cop looked at him a moment longer without saying anything. Then he went to join his partner. They sat in the car and looked at their computer but didn’t look at Lucien and Kia again.

  Lucien got to his feet and looked over at the school but the playground was empty now, the children and the teachers all gone. He and Kia got back in the Range Rover. Orpheus shone so brightly now they couldn’t even look at him. Lucien could barely make out Kia in the seat beside him.

  “We are all right,” Orpheus said. “We will all be all right in the end, until we are no more.”

  “What do we do now?” Kia asked, her words little more than a whisper.

  “Now we kill the angel,” Lucien said.

  * * *

  LUCIEN WENT back to the church as the sun was setting. The sky was flat and strangely empty of aircraft. Lucien couldn’t even see the lights of a drone anywhere. He wondered if there had been another terror attack somewhere, and then he realized he didn’t care.

  He’d left Orpheus and Kia at home. The boy shone too brightly to even look upon now, and his speech was incoherent. Kia’s hands had kept slipping through his arms, and she’d had to repeatedly grab on to him to keep him from floating away.

  “If you can’t kill it, don’t bother coming back,” she’d said. “Because I’m going with Orpheus wherever he’s going.”

  Lucien brought the gun with him this time. It sat beside him on the seat like another passenger. A Glock handgun made of composite plastic. The perfect gun for a white-collar professional like himself. It was stylish without being aggressive and it still got the job done, at least in the shooting ranges and simulations, which were the only places he’d used it. Lucien thought the Glock should be in a design museum or art gallery somewhere if it wasn’t already. Like the iPhone and the cubicle, it was the sort of product that changed generations. It was the gun of the future that everyone was living in now.

  The parking lot in the cemetery was still empty when he arrived, the church still boarded up and abandoned. But he saw the flashes of light from inside the spire again, so he knew the angel was back. He suspected it was probably waiting for him, but that didn’t change his plans.

  He called the sorcerer from inside the Range Rover. The sorcerer answered after just one ring, as if he were expecting the call.

  “You want another dream,” the sorcerer said, as if he knew why Lucien was calling.

  “Can you take something from real life and make it into a dream?” Lucien asked.

  “I can do anything with a dream,” the sorcerer said. “But I feel I should once again point out the potential pr
oblems if an angel is involved.”

  “I want you to take what happens next and turn it into a dream,” Lucien said. “I want the world to see what happens to the angel. I want everyone to see there won’t be an apocalypse.”

  He disconnected before the sorcerer could say anything else and got out of the Range Rover. He flipped the safety off the Glock as he crossed the cemetery. He tried to keep his breathing deep and even, like the instructors had taught him in the shooting exercises he’d often done on corporate retreats. But the exercises had involved rampaging co-workers and terror attacks, not angels waiting for him in forgotten churches.

  He wasn’t surprised to find the front doors of the church locked when he reached the entrance. He didn’t bother trying to kick them open because he knew they would be reinforced on the inside. Every teenager and homeless person in the city had probably tried to break in here at one time or another.

  He went around the side of the church and checked the windows until he found a loose corner in one of the pieces of wood covering the glass. He wrenched at it with his hands and pulled it open more, cracking the wood and then bending the broken piece back on itself. Now he could see a corner of the stained glass: a man with golden skin on his knees as he looked up at something Lucien couldn’t see. Lucien smashed the glass out with the Glock and then pulled himself through the opening he’d made.

  It was so dark inside it was as if light didn’t even exist. He took out his iPhone and turned on the flashlight, then looked around for a moment. He was surprised to see the inside of the church still looked like the inside of a church. There were pews in orderly rows, with hymn books scattered on the benches. An empty cross hung on the wall behind the altar. There were no people but there were definitely signs of them. Clothes were scattered about the pews, covering most of them.

  No, not scattered, Lucien realized. They were placed there in an orderly fashion. Pants and skirts resting on the seats, shirts and blouses draped over the backs of the pews. Shoes on the floor. The clothing was both adult and children’s. It was as if someone had come in here and laid out all the clothes to create the idea of a congregation. Or as if the people in the clothes had all vanished into thin air at the same time during a service.

  Lucien stared at the scene for a moment, then found the door that led to the rear area of the church. He went through and stepped into a scene of destruction. The ceiling was partially collapsed and the ground littered with debris. A stairway hung in the air in front of him, reaching up into the darkness. The bottom few steps were broken off and lay in fragments on the ground. Lucien looked up into the void overhead and saw the stairs circling their way up the inside of the spire. A light flickered somewhere near the top, and Lucien could hear whispers even though he couldn’t make out the words.

  He pulled himself up onto the broken stairs and climbed higher into the spire. He used the phone to light the stairs as he ascended. He didn’t want to step into any gaps and fall back to the earth, not when he was this close to the angel.

  The whispers became clearer as he went. He began to make out individual words.

  “... redemption ... purify ... legion ... sacrament ...”

  The words were all in different voices, as if there were many angels up there speaking. Lucien tightened his grip on the Glock and kept climbing.

  The angel was waiting for him on a landing partway up. It was a secret library of sorts. Three of the walls were covered in shelves that bore ancient-looking tomes: the sort of leather-bound books that you’d see as props in movies or rich people’s homes. The fourth wall was mostly missing, a ragged hole that opened into the night.

  The angel stood there glowing with light, but not as brightly as Orpheus now was. It fell silent when Lucien appeared and it studied him as he stepped onto the landing and pointed the Glock at it. Its wings drifted behind it, the flames curling about the edges of the books but not igniting them.

  “Whatever you did to my son, I want you to stop it now,” Lucien said, and he was surprised at how calm he sounded.

  “The seraphim are beyond the reckoning of the fallen world is always falling and we cannot save the unsaved who will not be saved who are kingdom come,” the angel said, each word in a different voice. So at least there was only one angel, Lucien thought. Unless there was more than one in the same body. He only had so many bullets, though, so he didn’t want to think about that.

  “I don’t know if you’re speaking gibberish or angel or if you’re just insane,” Lucien said. “I want you to take the light back from Orpheus. If you don’t ...” He dropped the iPhone to the ground and wrapped his free hand around the wrist of his shooting hand while he assumed the firing stance he had practised in the simulations. He doubted he’d sway the angel with his words, but he didn’t want to just shoot it in case his bullets did nothing at all. The Glock was the one piece of leverage he might have.

  The angel didn’t move but its wings drifted forward, curling around Lucien on either side.

  “The now is the only when and there are no other times that can be saved so rejoice that you have known this when for it no longer is and can never be again,” the angel said, but this time it spoke all of its words in Orpheus’s voice.

  Lucien didn’t know what that meant. Perhaps the angel was toying with him. Perhaps it meant Orpheus was gone and the angel had somehow claimed him. Perhaps all the voices it spoke in were victims of the light. Perhaps it was trying to appeal to his emotions, hoping he wouldn’t shoot it if it spoke with his son’s voice. There were more perhaps than he could think of in that moment, and none of them meant anything.

  The iPhone rang with Kia’s ring tone, but Lucien didn’t even glance down at it. He kept his eyes on the angel. Its wings drifted closer to him, until he could feel the heat of the flames on his skin. No, not heat. Something else entirely. More like a pulling on his skin, as if his body were being sucked toward the wings.

  The iPhone stopped ringing and now the angel spoke again. Only this time it spoke with Kia’s voice. “Oh my God, Lucien, I can’t hang on to him anymore! He’s nothing but light now! I can’t even see him anymore!”

  Lucien pulled the trigger of the Glock, once, twice, three times. The landing flashed with even more light and the crack of the Glock firing in the confined quarters was louder than thunder. It was like the world itself was breaking apart.

  Lucien stared at the three holes that had suddenly opened up in the angel’s chest. Golden beams shot out of them like flashlights. The walls smoked and blackened where the beams touched them.

  The angel and Lucien looked at each other for a moment, and now the angel was silent. Lucien couldn’t pull the trigger again. He couldn’t even move. He was paralyzed, but he didn’t know if it was shock or fear or something else that kept him frozen.

  “Oh my God is dead,” the angel said, in a voice Lucien hadn’t heard yet. It sounded like wind chimes and angry wasps at the same time.

  Then the angel’s wings flared and vanished, like candles blown out by a sudden wind. The angel leaned forward and fell. It hit the landing and crashed through it, falling into the darkness beneath them. Debris from the shattered landing rained down after it.

  Lucien managed to step back onto the stairs before the landing gave way beneath him. He stared down after the angel. It bounced off the walls as it fell, and the spire of the church shook all around him. When it hit the ground below, the spire shook harder, as if a shock wave had just passed through it. The golden light flared up, so bright that Lucien had to squint.

  The spire continued to shake around Lucien so hard he put a hand against the wall to steady himself, but it was no good. The wall cracked under his fingers, lines shooting out in all directions like lightning bolts. Then shards of wood began to fall down upon and past him from above, and he knew the spire was collapsing. He heard the iPhone ring again and he realized it was somehow in his hand once more. He had picked it up without realizing as the tower came apart.

  It was Kia
again. “He’s floating away!” she screamed. “He’s floating up into the sky and I can’t hold him down!”

  Lucien looked out through the hole in the spire and saw the lights of the city out there, the world that kept on existing even though it was coming apart in here. He saw the skeleton of the Relic looming above it all, reaching up to the heavens. He looked for Orpheus but couldn’t see him among all the other bright lights.

  He’d failed his son, his family. He hadn’t protected Orpheus and the boy had become infected with the light. Because of the dream Lucien had wanted. He hadn’t killed the girl to save his son. He’d thought maybe killing the angel would be enough, but it wasn’t.

  “Are you there?” Kia cried. “Where are you?”

  Lucien knew there was only one thing he could do. He looked down into the light of the fallen angel below him. And then he stepped into the abyss and fell down after it, into the collapsing ruin of the church.

  “He’s coming back!” Kia cried. “He’s falling back down to me.”

  Lucien could almost sense Kia opening her arms wide to catch their son. He closed his eyes but he could still see the light through his eyelids. As he fell toward it, he wondered if he was still dreaming and what would happen when he woke.

  The Only

  INNOCENT SOUL IN HELL

  I've seen every kind of sinner you can imagine in Hell. Murderers and mass murderers. Blasphemers and heretics. Identity thieves and spammers. And many more you can’t imagine. I’m the first demon you’ll meet when you arrive here, but trust me, I won’t be the last. My name is Molox, and I’m the Infernal Gatekeeper to Hell, the Endless Keeper of the Books of Sin, the Unholy Judge of the Damned.

  Well, those used to be my titles. These days, I’m known as the Processing Clerk, Department of Admissions and Exits. I feel the new title lacks the menacing weight of the older ones, but the lower-downs say we have to keep up with the mortal world in order to stay relevant.