by Dale Bailey
“Christian?” he said.
“Yeah, it felt older somehow. I remember reading in Ben’s books how Christianity transformed pagan myth, made it safe, harmless, domesticated it somehow. But a thing like that, it resists domestication.”
“I remember the scars,” he said. “Like it was a warrior or something.”
“A war in heaven,” she said. “A war between gods, or beings so like gods, they might as well be.” She racked the final glass and stood in front of him, her eyes intent. “Do you think it was good?”
“That’s a human term,” he said. “Maybe … maybe it was just powerful, or had been once.”
“And whatever effect it had on us, here, in the Run?”
“Purely incidental, I guess,” he said.
They were quiet for a while. Henry listened to the jazz, following the music, complex, elusive. He could sense a pattern there, a meaning just beyond the surface, but every time he thought he had a hold of it, it slipped away somehow.
Emily said, “I guess it does comfort me. Just the fact that it existed at all. I guess that means there’s something out there, and that helps a little, I suppose.”
The music rolled on in the silence that followed.
“Henry,” she said, “what do you believe?”
But he had no answer.
As he drove home from the Observer, the late-winter sky fading toward dark, he found himself pondering the question once again.
What do you believe?
After dinner, he sat late in the study. The three wrinkled sheets of notes were in the drawer where he had left them. He unfolded them carefully, and not for the first time traced with his fingers his father’s words—as if he could absorb Quincy Sleep’s thoughts, Quincy Sleep’s faith. But faith escaped; it always did.
In his imagination, he saw the thing once again, rising up before him. The old words came back to him in a stir of wings—the fallen ones, the healing ones—but they seemed inadequate somehow, too cramped, too confining. No language could contain it.
Aquinas wound purring around his ankles, and as he bent to stroke the cat, he thought: I cannot believe, not in my father’s god.
Yet he could no longer not believe, not anymore.
So he settled as always for half measures, Pascal’s Wager, that sense of order running just under the surface of things—a dapple of tree-shot green on a sunny afternoon, the awful beauty of a rose. It was there. It was always there, just barely out of reach.
“Henry?”
He looked up, smiling.
Emily stood in the doorway. Through the nightgown, he detected the faint swelling of her belly, and once again that sense of mystery and awe possessed him. Faith and mystery. We live in it all the time, he thought. It surrounds us like the air, not answers but always more questions.
Maybe it was enough. He supposed it would have to be.
“It’s late,” Emily said. “Come to sleep.”
He climbed the stairs behind her and undressed by the light of the bedside lamp.
“You missing your father?” she said.
“And Ben. I’d have liked to know him better.”
“Me, too.”
They were silent for a time, thinking of all the dead. Then she touched the bed. “Come here, you,” she said.
So he turned out the light and laid himself beside her.
After a time, they slept. He did not dream.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No aspiring novelist could wish for more generous and able assistance than that I received in the process of writing The Fallen. James Patrick Kelly, Barry Malzberg, Kris Rusch, and Batya Yasgur all read and commented on various drafts of this book, as did my agent, Matt Bialer, and my editor, Laura Anne Gilman. My thanks go to Sherrie Bohrman, who helped answer my medical questions; Glen Litman, who shared anecdotes from his years as a mechanic in the coal mines of West Virginia and Ohio; Larry Grimes and Frank Gorman, who responded to various theological inquires; Don Cox, my dissertation advisor, who gave me time to complete the first draft; and Jack Slay, who was always available to talk. I am especially indebted to my parents and my wife, the lovely and talented Jean Singley Bailey, both for their careful reading and for providing support and encouragement in ways too numerous to mention.
About the Author
Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family and has published three novels: The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay Jr.). His short fiction, collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, has won the International Horror Guild Award and has twice been nominated for the Nebula Award. You can find him online at www.dalebailey.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Dale Bailey
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4976-0193-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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