Seraphim

by Jon Michael Kelley

  People slowed, staring in concern.

  An employee from the studio peered around at her from inside the entrance. “You all right, ma’am?”

  “Morning sickness,” she told him, then managed a placating smile. “I’m fine. Really.”

  In the window, she saw the reflection of someone standing over her, an unusually tall, looming figure. But when she turned there was no one there. Then that strange and comforting touch again, as if someone were stroking her anxiety with warm, wispy fingers. The sensation was so profound, so promising, that any lingering dread of miscarrying her baby was quickly ushered from her thoughts.

  The tempest passed. Then a brief but intense blinding flash of silver, followed by a strangely pleasant cramping sensation.

  The tall figure again. In the window. Something spreading outward from behind its back, like…wings.

  Magnificent, enormous wings, stretching triumphantly past the edges of the window, then beyond the peripheral vision of her mind. Folding inward now, enshrouding her, suffocating her with a palpable radiance that was indescribably serene.

  Then it was over. All was normal again. Almost. The picture of the little girl remained. Behind the window. Staring back at her.

  Those eyes!

  And her sudden need to possess that photograph was so gripping, so consuming that she nearly wrenched the door from its hinges as she burst into the studio.

  ELEVEN YEARS LATER

  “If the religious projections of man correspond to a reality that is superhuman and supernatural, then it seems logical to look for traces of this reality in the projector himself.”

  – Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels

  Part One

  Pictures

  1.

  Perched within the confines of a towering oak, it gazed down upon the playground, regarding each child predatorily. Immersed in a tangle of shadows, it had only stopped here to rest, to groom, but had inadvertently stumbled onto something. Something that roused in it a kind of primitive panic. An urgency to fight or flee.

  And that something was infesting one of the rollicking bodies below.

  Extending a leathery wing, it began to preen with swift precision. In seconds, the appendage was glistening, free of the dust and grime it had gathered in flight.

  It tipped its head, pensive as it held the thin membrane taut against a dapple of sunlight, watching the blood pulse through the labyrinthine array of veins and capillaries. It was amused, but only briefly. It then turned and began cleaning the other wing, the children below never leaving its scrutiny for more than a second or two.

  The scent wafted by again. It stretched out its neck and licked the air. It was a most unsettling odor; alarming in its individuality, in its familiarness, as it now believed it had once known such a stench. Snorting again, it shook its head wildly. Its inquisitiveness was paying the price for its tenacity; a bear willing to be stung many times to get the sweet honey within the hive.

  It was growing more aroused, the hair bristling along its spine.

  Then—as the face of the little girl came into full view—it remembered.

  Like a seahorse, it moved in unison with the wind-stirred branches. Just another limb, another bough swaying in a confusion of phantoms.

  It would have to abandon its original errand and return to the place called Seattle. To alert the man who longed to fly.

  The angel-maker.

  2.

  Before a barren patch of wall, Eli Kagan paced in circles. Some tight, some broad. Some not really circles at all, but more like the wobbly orbits of doomed satellites.

  He was expecting the window to arrive any time now. Any moment.

  Despite the relative coolness of his mother’s basement, his undershirt was saturated, the wetness penetrating to the spine and armpits of his black clerical shirt.

  But then, he was always a sweater.

  Today’s temperatures had dipped back down into the mid eighties, a welcome retreat from the preceding days’ record heat.

  Lips pursed bloodless, fingers interlocked behind his back, he recalled, as he went round and round, the story of Little Black Sambo. They shared some affinities, he and that tale, controversy not being the least of those. But the one foremost on his mind was: If that fucking window doesn’t show up in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to churn myself into butter!

  But those had been tigers running themselves into “ghi,” he reminded himself, and that it was the boy with whom he had a lot in common. Just like Sambo, Eli had given his little Red Coat and little Blue Trousers and little Purple Shoes with Crimson Soles and Crimson Linings to the grandest Tiger in the Jungle.

  But he still had his beautiful Green Umbrella to hide behind, known in other politically incorrect tales as the Catholic Priesthood.

  Round and round and round he goes…

  As do many aged and avid collectors of antiquities, Eli had become a deft authority on his obsession, that being archaic colored glass, ecclesiastical his forte. Although he often used the term himself, he knew that stained glass was a misnomer, as it is only one of the glasses so employed. Nevertheless, he was quite confident that this erroneous name would continue to be used for all time to inaccurately describe colored windows and their glass, simply because it had been so fixed in the public mind. Just as deeply and permanently as had become its naïve interpretations of Good and Evil.

  However, Eli’s windows—an inventory of six, so far—were not souvenirs filched from some medieval mosque or twelfth-century cathedral. They were rewards given to him by his mentor.

  But more importantly, they were portals; sashes upon which the universe itself was hinged.

  And through which he would soon have ingress.

  “Come on, come on,” he grumbled.

  The empty space of wall before him was reserved for his seventh—and what was to be his last—window, its six predecessors spaced evenly and adjacently along the same gray cinder block, as if on display in some subterranean gallery renowned for its eclectic art. Each window had been tightly fastened to the masonry by what he could only describe as “magical means,” as their framed edges appeared to have been soldered into the brick. And though each one only measured four-feet by six-feet, he was confident that they were pliant enough to allow Jupiter and its ever-growing number of moons to comfortably pass should they and this basement ever cross interstellar paths.

  These were not windows in the availing sense, were not offering colorfully cloudy, misshapen perspectives of the Seattle afternoon. Rather, they were ornamented, framed pictorials, each one a hodgepodge of Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance persuasion and technique. Small, juxtaposed pieces of translucent glass artfully arranged into powerful images.

  But while most praiseworthy colored glass portrayed biblical accounts—the kinds one would find in Le Mans, France, home of the famous Ascension, or Canterbury, England, where reside a magnificent series of twelfth-century windows representing the genealogy of Christ—Eli’s windows might have been depicting choice passages from Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost. There were human figures cringing from gargoyle-like demons swooping down at them, others writhing and thrashing in pools of bright yellow fire, and still others impaled upon spires of eternal flame.

  …and where he stops…

  But that would not be his fate, he knew. No, his destiny was not profiled in the images before him, not blatantly and in such fabled conflagration, but rather in the peripheral regions not explored in the glass murals. Those areas where reality could be penciled in, then erased; brushed on, then whitewashed; scored, then filled, all at the artist’s whim. And, all modesty aside, Eli considered himself a regular fucking Rembrandt. A prodigy.

  Some twelve years had passed since he’d come into possession of the first window, each proceeding one having been acquired upon his simultaneous receipt of a ten-year-old girl.

  Eli’s love for glass tapestry was as old as his love for angel lore, ergo his assign
ments and rewards. His mentor had kindly integrated these passions into the playbook; had, in fact, built his stratagem around them. A compliment in and of itself.

  …nobody knows.

  The coach, however, had yet to make all the game’s objectives known to him. Little bits and pieces learned over many years on the playing field, that was all. It was never even clear to him if his team was winning or losing.

  But one thing was certain: he was still in the game.

  Another safe bet was that the game balls—the angels and windows—were placebos for his cramped and near-sighted intellect; personifications to keep him focused, effigies to bolster his morale, moorings when he was blind-sided or took a knee to the groin. Supernaturally speaking, of course.

  Throughout the years of looking beneath the surface for cryptic clues as to what his mentor might be up to, Eli often considered the possibility that there weren’t any, that the powers that be were prone to simply act out impetuously sometimes, perhaps driven to whim by mere boredom. To set things in motion that fulfill nothing more than the need to keep their muscles from atrophying.

  There was nothing furtive about a dog stretching itself on a rug after a long nap; no mystical bombshells about that. After all, eternity was forever. And that could get very old.

  Eventually, though, he’d realized that the answers weren’t likely going to be so anemic; that he just wasn’t able to see beyond the facade. Some things were not for him to comprehend. Not yet. He was still an errand boy, a mere mortal, and knew there was plenty to forfeit should he lose that perspective.

  He was so close now; the answers dangling this very moment from the talons of one of his mentor’s more domesticated beasts.

  Eli thought he couldn’t wait to see the rest of that menagerie.

  And if it turned out that the whole experience was nothing but a kind of hazing, a test of his will and devotion, perhaps something all inaugurates for the higher ranks had to endure, then he could live with that. For they had not been tribulations. He enjoyed the art of angel-making. Immensely so.

  It sure as hell beat fasting for forty days and forty nights while playing stenographer to some burning bush. Eli didn’t know what he was going to bring down from this mountain, but he was certain it wasn’t going to be two stone tablets and a sunburn.

  So far, he felt confident that he’d more than proved his loyalty, and would continue to do so no matter what shape or color or however allegorical the escapade.

  But then, it was all allegory. Nothing but one contrived comparison to a systematized delusion after another, life and religion were. He’d reached that way of thinking long before his first day of catechism so many years ago. Then, he’d just referred to it less eloquently as “a crock of shit.”

  The scriptures couldn’t fool him then, and—after three decades and counting as a Catholic priest—they most certainly couldn’t fool him now.

  On a scale of one to ten, Eli would have to set the marker at maybe two-point-five to indicate his belief in the autonomous existence of orthodoxy’s God. Or any god, for that matter, all heavenly and not-so-heavenly creatures included. And given that same stipulation, he would have to place his own mentor at a six. Maybe seven. A generous placement indeed, for Eli didn’t believe anything deserved an absolute ten, because nothing absolutely existed. Although he wasn’t exactly a charter member of the “Reality Is a Self-Perpetuating Illusion” club, he’d snuck into enough meetings to finally come away persuaded. Hell, to rate anything an eight was charitable. Nine was downright altruistic. Ten and beyond were…well, the EEG tracings of a comatose Stephen Hawking.

  He wasn’t exactly sold on this ideology, or any other for that matter, but it continued to maintain a certain appeal; was alluring in a maverick sort of way, he supposed. And the obscured relationship he and Gamble maintained only added to the eccentricity. But this folie a deux sometimes caused him distress, as he would occasionally feel alienated from the rest of the world and would go searching for his sanity. Until he again realized that there was no such thing.

  And throughout his years as an angel-maker, he’d become even more suspect that reality was just a land of mirrors. But sometimes the image staring back was something more than just the reflection of the one peering in. Staggeringly more.

  Eli’s mentor, case in point, was once himself the likeness of man’s biggest fear (or so he claimed), but was now boasting a different visage, one smiling buoyantly back from that reflective surface, as he had finally removed himself from man’s hip and was now his own free-floating person.

  The mirror-makers, Eli thought, were likely in for some wild mimicry now. Eternal fire and brimstone would soon become passé, those reflections replaced by the faces of new and astounding horrors; tortures more chic and stylish, and more grisly than any man could ever dare imagine. His mentor had confided in him that much.

  He snickered. Sometimes he just couldn’t help but feel like a proud father.

  A Jack of all Trades, Eli’s mentor could now be found in the directory under his new name, Mr. Gamble. He’d once confided in Eli that the ones man had given him—Mephistopheles, Satan, Archenemy, and so on—were just a bit too conspicuous for his tastes, as he was his own plastic surgeon now, had reshaped his identity by nipping here and tucking there, and was truly a timid sort of fellow who could “certainly do without such sphincter-crimping introductions when entering a room.”

  Again, Eli wondered where truth began and reality ended, what was man’s reflection and what wasn’t, and what used to be but isn’t anymore. It was so hard to even guess with his mentor. A veritable heap of integrity and guile, fact and fiction, Gamble was.

  But at least his mentor showed up when paged. No one else had even returned his calls. Ever.

  Heaven still might be a likelihood, Eli had to admit, but the mind of man—the real hell if there ever was one—was just a magical window away.

  At least it would be for him.

  Behind him, on a sheet-rocked wall, was a sweeping, shrine-like montage of black-and-white photographs; pictures of winged little girls. His angels. And the pain and terror shared by all were so extreme as to be the definitive expressions of looming death.

  This he called the Wall of Faces.

  Out of the nearly hundred pictures, there emerged six distinct girls.

  Eli had arranged the snapshots into the shapes of two outspread wings. The right wing was complete, while the left lacked finality by a few dozen more photos, the ones he would soon take of his seventh and last angel. And the space between the two wings, the place where they would naturally join to a body, was a black chalk outline of his physical self, arms flat against his sides, traced by his own mother over a decade ago.

  This seventh angel would provide him his own doorway to an infinite kingdom. And if he wanted, he could even pick out a crown and scepter on the way. This he’d been promised.

  The anticipation finally overwhelming him, he stopped his pacing, unlocked his hands from behind his back, then pushed them against the sides of his head, noticing as he did the bloodless tips of his fingers, looking as if they’d been fitted with white thimbles. As he pushed them through his hair, into his scalp, he discovered that they were completely numb, as well.

  He stepped up to the wall. “Why isn’t it here yet!” he screamed at the empty space. Spittle flew with the words, arcing like a rainbow across the sixth window.

  Mouth gaping, he stared at the indelicacy. He couldn’t have been more mortified if he’d ejaculated on the Pope’s Easter sermon.

  Then, a distant commotion of wings. Coming from behind the same window. Getting close now. Closer. Eli peered into the mural, his despair now ebbing into stark dismay, confusion.

  Finally, then, his last flicker of hope was doused.

  The courier slammed into the back of the window, then continued to beat itself against the glass, desperate to come through.

  Eli touched the mural and the courier materialized, pouring out from the window a
nd its Romanesque traceries like dough through a sieve. It fell unmanageably to the floor, coalesced, then unfolded its wings; wings plenty large enough to conceal an adolescent girl.

  But Eli already knew there was no girl, no angel; knew it the moment he heard the courier approaching from behind window number six, the same one from which it had been earlier dispatched. He knew then that sweet little girl number seven, for whatever reason, wasn’t in the courier’s custody.

  Eli wavered unsteadily, and for a moment feared he just might faint.

  The creature, agitated as hell, rose up on its haunches and began sniffing the air. It turned to Eli, regarded him with a suspicious glare, snorted, then leapt to the Wall of Faces, and began perusing the photographs.

  Dumbstruck, Eli stood motionless, rapt in the courier’s strange behavior.

  Then, like some freakish hunting dog, the creature froze, its muzzle pointing directly at the felled bird. It began to hiss.

  Eli moved alongside the courier, studying the face in the photograph. Although the creature had not singled out the largest picture of this particular angel, it had certainly chosen the most identifiable. Her face was almost square with the lens, and, in stark contrast with her other pictures, her suffering was absent. In this one she wore an expression of hopeless resignation, when he had captured the very moment the muscles in her face had finally tired of all the contorting, all the grimacing and clenching, and had slackened to the consistency of sun-warmed tar. Behind her eyes, it looked as if her soul were staring sorrowfully back at him—grievous not over its fate, but for his own.

  Fuck you and your pity, he thought.

  She’d definitely been his prettiest.

  Many years had passed, but he’d not forgotten her name.