by Bruce Blake
I broke into a trot leaving Piper behind and passing the yawning cave mouths. As I jogged, I got no closer to her. Cave openings went by, my feet pounded the red clay leaving dusty footprints in my wake, yet I made no progress toward my goal. I glanced over my shoulder at Piper watching me from the top of the stairs, her figure small with distance. I was moving but not going anywhere.
“What the fuck?”
I slowed my pace and, as so often seems to be the case in my screwed-up joke of an afterlife, chose exactly the wrong moment to do so.
I didn’t see Father Dominic charge out of the mouth of the cave until too late. He’d built up a pretty good head of steam for an old, dead guy, and the impact of him hitting me square in the chest threw me to the ground like a poorly secured tackling dummy at a high school football practice.
My shoulder and hip hit the ground first and we skidded across the rocky dirt, coming to a stop with the top third of my body hanging over the edge of the cliff and the dead priest perched on my chest. I twisted to look down at the ground thirty-five feet below—maybe it wouldn’t break my neck if we went over. The thought fled as Dominic’s fingers wrapped around my throat.
“Take me back.”
I grabbed his wrists to prevent him from strangling me but realized I could breathe—he held me but wasn’t trying to squeeze my life from me.
Not yet.
I shook my head.
“Not a chance.”
His fingers constricted the words, made them small and he must not have liked my response because he tightened his hold. I felt my cheeks go hot and red as the blood in my head achieved little success finding its way back to my heart. He rocked his weight forward bending me over the precipice. His eyes—the irises dark outlines in a sea of red—glared maniacally, his yellowed teeth clenched, and I noticed for the first time he was missing two. He’d had all his teeth when he died.
“It’s because of you I’m here.”
I tried to shake my head because I knew he was wrong. The first time I’d been to the underworld, I saw the priest’s Hell, so I knew he’d made his own bed.
“Let him go.”
My eyes flickered away from Father Dominic to Piper standing over his shoulder. A gust of warm breeze blew her hair back and her pale skin stood out in stark contrast to the orange-red cliff behind her. I momentarily forgot the priest’s fingers gripping my trachea.
Dominic looked over his shoulder at her and snarled.
“What are you doing here?”
“It doesn’t matter. Get off him.”
“Does he know you’re with him?”
The priest’s words caught my attention or, more specifically, the way they spoke to each other did: as if they knew one another.
“He?” I wheezed but the word was too strangled—literally—to be heard.
She grabbed his shoulder but he shrugged it away and shifted his attention back to me.
“Take me back.”
I looked from Piper to Dominic, Piper to Dominic, and felt my eyes rub against my eyelids as they bulged from the pressure the priest exerted on my throat. With my bug-eyed gaze settled back on Father Dominic and contemplating how badly someone needed to get the man a bottle of Visine, I noticed a shadow fall on the ground beside him.
Piper straightened and took a step away.
“Please let him go, Dominic,” the new voice said.
The priest’s eyes remained on mine, his grip stayed tight, but his expression faded like a photograph left too long in the sun. His lips sagged back to cover his teeth; his mouth dipped at the corners; the intense look in his eyes softened.
“S--sister?”
“Please, Dominic.”
He unlaced his fingers from my throat and leaned back taking the pressure off. A wave of vertigo spun my head as it hung over empty space. The feeling increased when he rose from where he’d been seated on my midsection, removing the counter-weight keeping me from sliding over the edge.
I’d have gone over if Piper’s electric touch on my arm didn’t steady my disorientation. My wits egan to gather back in my head as I struggled myself to a sitting position—with Piper’s help—and blinked hard to reset my bugged-out eyes. My slightly doubled vision rectified itself and I saw Father Dominic kneeling before my mother, hands clasped in front of his chest as if in prayer.
“Sister Agnes,” he said. “Please forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive.”
I clamored to my feet and brushed orangey dust off the ass of my pants. My mother didn’t look away from the priest genuflecting before her. I rubbed my throat and turned my head first one way, then the other, flexing the muscles in my neck as I watched the conversation. Piper wasn’t at my side and I heard her shoes scraping ground as she crept away. The vertigo was gone, but confusion did a fine job of making my head lurch in its stead.
Father Dominic bowed his head to look at the dirt. His hands remained clasped in front of him.
“I failed you,” he said. “I didn’t defend you before the church. I didn’t keep the bastard angel from taking you.” He sniffed deeply. “I didn’t do anything.”
My mother put her hand on the priest’s cheek.
“That isn’t why you’re here, you know that, Dominic. Icarus cannot take you back.”
He looked up, tears gleaming on his cheeks in the tangerine light.
“Then why did you bring me here to him if not to ask for him to take me back?”
My mother may have answered but I’d stopped listening. I’d also stopped breathing, stopped having reasonable thoughts.
She brought him here. Him, the man responsible for all the troubles in my life. The man who nearly caused my son’s death, the reason I’m in Hell now.
I took a step back, suddenly needing to be farther away from these two people. My mother looked up at the movement and spoke, this time I heard her words.
“Piper. I should have suspected you’d be involved.”
Her words came out icy enough to send a shiver down my spine.
How does she know her? How does a resident of Hell know a guardian angel?
I looked at Piper, gazed into her wide eyes. She shook her head as if to deny my thoughts but didn’t respond to my mother. My head spun as my brain worked its way through what unfolded before me.
My mother had brought Father Dominic to me, the man who’d been my enemy practically since birth.
Piper—a supposed guardian angel and my recent lover—was acquainted with both of them. And also with the ominously mentioned ‘him’, whoever that might be—I might have guessed, but none of the possibilities would be anyone I wanted to know. Anger and confusion combined in my already spinning head, picked up the remnants of fuzz left from my encounter with Piper to force all coherent thoughts out of my brain. I clenched my teeth, my vision blurred.
I looked at Father Dominic.
Asshole.
I looked at Piper.
Deceiver.
I looked at my mother.
My mother.
Traitor.
I couldn’t stay there any longer. They’d all manipulated me for their own purposes. None of them cared about me. No surprise from the murderous priest, but my mother and my lover? Which was worse?
I darted into the nearest cave, plunging into darkness without knowing where to go or what lay ahead. Behind me, I heard Piper’s voice calling me, then my mother’s, their words bouncing against the sides of the cave, the echoes combining with the beat of my footsteps to drown their words.
In the dark, my shoulder hit the wall of the cave, spun me around, but I kept on. Ahead, I saw a light, dim but there, and kept it directly ahead of me. It became my beacon to take me away from the priest, Piper, and my mother. I raced toward it like a child to an ice cream truck, only the driver of this ice cream truck would likely be a ghoul or demon, maybe the devil himself.
The cave wall rushed past beside me and a minute later, I spilled into a room with no business being in a cave. A bed,
a bedside table, a lamp; a nondescript bedroom with a wooden crucifix hung on the wall as the only decoration. It might have been anywhere but I felt I’d been there before. Plain white walls, gold shag carpet. I glanced around and saw nothing to indicate my location. I looked over my shoulder; the cave’s passage was gone behind me, replaced by another plain wall, a wooden door to my left. I moved toward it when I heard the woman’s voice.
I stepped back, listening to the unintelligible words. The voice grew louder and I knew it came toward the door so I faded into the corner, not sure if whoever it was would be able to see me.
Better safe than sorry.
Some strange things had happened to me, even in other people’s Hells. I crouched, making myself as small as possible in the corner, and waited.
The door opened and two women stepped through.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I have to call the doctor.”
“No.”
“But I can’t--”
“Yes. You. Can.” Each individual word a grunt.
Poe peered from under the hood of her black coat, watching silently. As it had been with the man on the railroad tracks, she’d been here before a long time ago. Everything was the same: the words they spoke, the golden shag on the floor, the crucifix on the wall. Sister Mary-Therese knelt between the legs of Sister Agnes—who the church no longer recognized as Sister Agnes by this time—the towel draped over her shoulder the lone tool she had to deliver her friend’s baby.
Though she couldn’t see them, Poe knew there were two other entities in the room, bickering like the siblings they were, arguing over how this would or should turn out. Neither of them realized her presence or knew someone else had sent her. With such a momentous event happening, larger forces than the two archangels were mobilized, and one used Poe as a pawn.
“But, Alesya--”
“There’s no...time.”
Breathing heavily, the woman on the bed fell back on the pillows, sweat standing on her brow. For a few seconds, it seemed like the pain subsided but then she tensed, came up onto her elbows again.
“Okay,” Sister Mary-Therese said. “Okay.”
Poe hadn’t known these women in her life, had only been in Sister Mary-Therese’s presence once before the priest ended her life by the pond. Despite not knowing them, she felt now as she did when she was here before: they were women of great power, women to be respected and loved. She felt she’d have been friends with them, given the chance.
Too bad her job was to take one of them to Hell.
Poe cowered against the wall. Living through the man on the railroad tracks again was bad, but this was worse. It wasn’t Aleysa’s fault she found herself in this position. Without intervention, Poe assumed she’d have remained Sister Agnes for the rest of her days, serving God until she lay on her death bed in old age.
Poe shook her head sadly—here Aleysa lay on her death bed, so much potential wasted by an angel’s lust.
“Push,” Sister Mary-Therese said.
“She will come with me.”
The deep, melodic peal of words floated out of empty air, but neither of the women noticed. Poe scanned the room and saw the two figures in the opposite corner nearest the bed, their shadowy silhouettes outlined against the white wall. She’d felt their presence the first time she was here, but hadn’t seen them.
Why can I see them now?
Strange things come to pass in Hell.
Sister Agnes let out a grunt worthy of a power-lifter surpassing his personal best.
“That’s it, that’s it. Keep pushing.”
Sister Mary-Therese reached over her friend’s knees and wiped the sweat off her forehead. The nun seemed understandably uncomfortable with her role as obstetrician. Poe imagined the convent teaching mentioned precious little about assisting a fellow nun giving birth. Spiritual birth, emotional birth, perhaps, but not the having a baby kind of birth.
The thought sounded so much like one of Icarus’, it bubbled a nervous titter over Poe’s lips. She clamped her hand over her mouth. The two women on the bed didn’t notice, but the archangels—their figures filling in with shape and features and color—paused in their dispute and glanced in her direction.
She froze.
†‡†
My mother grunted and my gut twinged. Moments before, I’d mentally accused her of betraying me and now I was watching her make the ultimate sacrifice for me. She gave up everything. It would have been so much easier to don a disguise and find a back-alley abortion clinic than to be a nun carrying a baby to term. How different her life would have been.
She gave it all up for me. And what have I done to thank her?
The anger and confusion that drove me into the tunnel faded, replaced by the urge to rush to her side and comfort her. I tried, but my feet wouldn’t move.
“That’s it, that’s it. Keep pushing.”
I heard the giggle right after Sister Mary-Therese wiped the sweat from my mother’s face. It was so small and quiet, I wasn’t completely sure I’d heard it. Neither of the women made the noise—my mother too involved in giving birth to laugh and Sister Mary-Therese too considerate a woman to giggle under these circumstances.
There was someone else in the room.
It didn’t surprise me, I’d seen this before and there had been a Carrion and a couple of bickering archangels in attendance at the momentous occasion of my birth.
And my mother’s death.
I looked around the room. A vague bank of fog floated in one corner, like the way the faces of people in a crowd on a newscast are blotted out. I blinked and it faded, forgotten about when I spied the figure crouched in the other corner. A figure dressed in black with a cowl pulled over his head.
The Carrion.
†‡†
Minutes passed, the baby’s first breath inching closer. Poe’s apprehension increased with each second closer it grew. She’d attempted to change the outcome in the shed and couldn’t. She tried to change what happened to the man on the railroad tracks without success. Everything pointed to her inability to influence the outcome to be anything other than what had already happened, but she was determined to try.
If I don’t collect the soul, she may live.
The two archangels—solid now, though still invisible to the women—moved closer to the bed. They loomed over the nuns, shoulder to shoulder, like rabid fans attempting to glimpse their favorite celebrity.
But Azrael would take her to Hell.
Only a fifty/fifty chance things would turn out for the better if she didn’t do something to influence the outcome. If she could. She needed to make sure Michael ended up with Sister Agnes’ soul or, preferably, neither of them.
I have to distract Azrael.
Her feet carried her forward a step. Sister Agnes grunted, the tail end of it turning to a half-scream. Sister Mary-Therese’s voice murmured beneath her friend’s.
“You can do it. You can do it. Here it comes. You can do it.”
The startling cry of a newborn gasping its first breath stopped both of them. Sister Mary-Therese guided the tiny body free of its mother, gently cradled it in her arms and did her best to hold the child up for the new mother to see.
“Aleysa. It’s a--”
The first time this happened—the time it really happened—the newborn so enthralled Poe she hadn’t noticed anything else go on around her. This time, knowing the outcome and being determined to change it refocused her attention. She looked over Sister Mary-Therese’s shoulder when the gush of blood followed the baby out of Sister Agnes’ womb, soaking the bed in crimson, and saw the new mother’s face go white.
She saw Michael’s hand on the woman’s stomach.
“No.”
She didn’t mean to say the word aloud. For years, she’d worshipped the archangel Michael, hung on his words, strove to please the angel responsible for saving her from the life of a Carrion. To find out responsibility
for the nun’s death rested with him and not Azrael, as she’d been led to believe...
Both archangels looked up, unaware until now that she was there. They all stared at each other for an instant. Poe’s heart thumped on her head.
How can this be?
She shook free of the shock first and grabbed Sister Agnes by the arm, wrenching her soul free of the earthly body before either angel claimed her. The threat of tears choked her throat closed, otherwise she might have paused to ask Michael why he had done this.
The spirit followed without protest as Sister Mary-Therese, oblivious to the others in the room, shouted for help.
She doesn’t know it’s too late.
The thought was welcome relief from the aching disappointment filling Poe’s limbs. If this had been real instead of a Hellish re-enactment, she might not have made it across the room and out the door. The weight of knowing, of disappointment, might have dragged her to the floor, curled her up in a ball, knees hugged to chest. But it wasn’t real, it happened nearly forty years before. Maybe what she was in wasn’t reality but Hell manipulating her memory.
With the soul of the nun trailing behind, Poe reached for the door knob, the hood falling away from her face. Only then did she see the man standing to the right of the door.
Only then did she look into the eyes of Icarus Fell.
†‡†
The first mewling, high-pitched cry—the first sound I ever made—startled me and brought prickly flesh to the back of my neck. I reached up and rubbed the goose bumps as Sister Mary-Therese held the baby-me up for my mother to see and told her I was a boy. Her words stopped mid-sentence and I smelled the coppery odor of my mother’s blood, like when I saw this in Hell before, but this time the Carrion stood between me and the bed so I didn’t have to see her bleed to death.
Sister Mary-Therese screamed for help as the Carrion snatched my mother’s soul and stumbled away from the bedside. I struggled to move and block the door, to stop this from happening again, but my legs only moved me two steps, positioning me beside the doorway.
