Fear to Tread

by Lucy Blue

  Fear to Tread

  Lucy Blue

  Published by Little Red Hen Romance

  This is a work of fiction. All names, places, characters and events are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this work in whole or in part, electronically or mechanically, shall constitute a violation of copyright.

  A version of this novel was originally published as Strange as Angels by Purple Sword Publications. It has been heavily revised.

  FEAR TO TREAD

  Copyright © 2016 Jessica Glanville

  Cover design by Jessica Glanville

  Table of Contents

  Special Thanks

  Chapter One – Laura

  Chapter Two – The Letters

  Chapter Three – The Visit

  Chapter Four – The Morning Star

  Chapter Five – Detective Lucas Black

  Chapter Six—Nate and Sylvia, 4B

  Chapter Seven—In the Garden of the Dead

  Chapter Eight—Jake’s Paintings

  Chapter Nine—In the Valley of the Light

  Chapter Ten—The Church

  Chapter Eleven—Praying for Help

  Chapter Twelve—The Half-Demon

  Chapter Thirteen—The Imps on the Street

  Chapter Fourteen—The Nymph in the Hallway

  Chapter Fifteen—The Angel in the Kitchen

  Chapter Sixteen—The Devil You Know

  Chapter Seventeen—The Priest and the Painting

  Chapter Eighteen—The Hospital

  Chapter Nineteen—The Waiting Room

  Chapter Twenty—Purgatory

  Chapter Twenty-One—The Gate

  Chapter Twenty-Two—The Road

  Chapter Twenty-Three—The Opening

  Other Little Red Hen Works by Lucy Blue

  About the Author:

  Special Thanks

  To Joy Azmatia and Traci Markou, both of whom tried hard and well to help me brand this book.

  Chapter One – Laura

  Laura meant to turn on the TV. One of the cable channels was showing an old movie musical she and Jake had always loved, beautiful people in white tie and ball gowns photographed in gorgeous black and white. But somehow she never got around to turning on the set. She sat on the couch with the remote in her hand and stared at the blank black screen as the shadows grew long and the room went dark.

  She didn’t snap out of the trance until the reflection of the streetlamp outside the window appeared in the center of the screen. “Oh shit!” She jumped up, letting the remote fall on the floor, and raced to grab her husband’s coat. “Sorry, baby,” she said as she put it on and wrapped his scarf around her neck. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She grabbed the letter she had written that morning and stuffed it in her pocket, crammed a hat down on her head, then headed out into the night.

  Snow was falling as the angel, Caleb, walked through the cemetery, headed home. He turned up the collar on his overcoat by habit, a detail learned over the millennia to blend in among mortals, pretending to feel the cold.

  The rusted iron gates were in sight when he saw a figure moving toward him, swathed in black. For a moment, he tensed, the figure’s size and swaddling making him think Lucifer had sent an imp to torment him. But she didn’t scuttle; she walked with purpose, fighting the icy wind. He faded back into the shadows to watch her pass, catching a glimpse of white skin and green eyes under the brim of the black hat and over the black folds of her scarf. She didn’t see him.

  He had already turned to walk away when he changed his mind.

  She knelt on the cold, bare earth of a fresh grave. He took a position out of sight, his footfalls silent. She unwrapped the scarf from her face; it trailed on the ground, too long for her. She reached into the pocket of her baggy black coat and took out a black candle in a glass holder painted with an icon of the Judge. Caleb suppressed a smile. If the ritual would comfort her, who was he to mock her?

  She set the candle in front of the headstone and lit it with a wooden match. Caleb bowed his head, expecting her to pray.

  But she didn’t. When he opened his eyes, she was taking something else from her pocket—a bottle of whiskey. She uncapped it, drank deeply, then set it down next to the candle, wiping her mouth with the back of her gloved hand. She took a folded letter from her other pocket and kissed it, holding it against her lips for a long time. Then she soaked it with whiskey, spilling some on her coat in the process. She was shaking, he realized, shaking and silently crying.

  She lit the letter on the candle’s flame and dropped it on the ground. Watching it burn, she did pray, her hands clasped like a child’s under her chin. Caleb was touched; he whispered his own prayer on her behalf. Grant her comfort, he prayed. Show her the way. As Your seraph, I ask it.

  When the letter was consumed, she blew out the candle and stood up. She stamped out the last glowing ember of her little burnt offering and wrapped the scarf around her face again—it was snowing harder now. She tucked the candle and the bottle back into her pockets and started back down the path toward the gate.

  Caleb turned away, sad for her but satisfied he had seen and done enough. He did feel for her, poor creature. Her grief and her faith had touched him deeply. Then a snippet of song came back to him on the wind. She was singing under her breath, her voice too soft for any other mortal to have heard her, almost tuneless, but ragged and sweet.

  “…can my baby be? The Lord took him away from me…”

  He turned back toward the path, but she was gone.

  He stretched out his hand toward the headstone, summoning the scattered ashes of the letter. They rushed back to him, their nature changing as if time were running backward, drawing back together and turning from black to white, every stroke of the closely-written text intact. He read what she had written, and every word dug into his heart. Her pain was raw and brutal as a death wound. In his time on this plane, he had wept at the beauty of Mozart’s Requiem at its very first performance. He had visited Michelangelo and seen his own angelic body breathed to life in stone. But nothing had touched him the way this human’s letter did, this outpouring of love and rage. She had lost her husband…but what was that to him? Every bone in this field had once been beloved by someone; every human suffered grief. Why should hers hurt him so?

  For two more nights, he came back to the graveyard and watched her repeat her ritual, and every night he read her letters after she was gone. Each one was different, each one drawing him deeper and deeper into her story. She meant them to be “therapy,” a way to exorcise her pain, but it wasn’t working. With every word she wrote, she seemed more desperate, more lost.

  For the first time, Caleb felt the impulse that had struck so many others of his kind—infected, he had always called it, like it was a sickness. He felt a physical need to help this human, to comfort her not at the hour of her death as was his usual mission but now, in her messy, painful, broken life.

  “No accidents,” he said to himself on the third night, letting the last letter crumble back to ash. He had not found her by chance. Fearless and resolved, he crouched over the grave. Spreading his golden wings behind him like a shield, he plunged his hand into the dirt, digging, grasping, breaking through the coffin, calling what he wanted upwards through the earth until his hand closed around it. The pattern of the man was still written in his lifeless flesh, and the angel absorbed it into himself. Howling in agony he fell on his face on the dead man’s grave, his wings shuddering, shriveling, fading away.

  Lucifer’s imp had only come to steal baubles, the little remembrances the mortal scum left behind for their dead. He watched the angel’s agony with glee, hardly believing his luck. As soon as he was
sure what had been done, he scuttled quickly toward the gateway, biting his own fist to hold back his laughter until he was safely in hell.

  Chapter Two – The Letters

  Dear Jake,

  Your sister is worried about me. That’s really sweet of her, considering. That was the thing we didn’t think about when we were deciding not to tell anybody you were sick until we absolutely had no choice. We never thought about how all the people who love you would feel about me after it was over. After you were gone. Dead. After you, Jake, my husband, were dead and gone and buried, and I, your wife, the one who helped you keep your secret, would be by myself with everybody hating me. Your mother hates me. She doesn’t even try to pretend she doesn’t, and I can’t blame her. I kind of hate me, too. She thinks keeping it all a secret was my idea, that you did it for me to keep her away. She didn’t believe you when you told her otherwise, and I’m not completely sure I believe you, either.

  I know it was your idea, but now that I have time to think about it, I wonder if you did it for me. Were you protecting me? How many times about how many other things did you give me shit for living in denial, for pretending I just didn’t notice the things that would hurt me, for protecting you and everybody else from ugly truth? That’s what I do; my art is fantasy.

  You were the one who was all about the truth. Was keeping the secret a gift you were giving me? Did you want to talk about it? Did you want your mama? I want so badly to ask you, and you’re not here to ask.

  Which I guess is the point of my writing. Your sister, your sweet, Catholic sister, suggested I pray to you in heaven. I laughed at her. I said if I could get down on my knees to you, it wouldn’t be to pray. I shocked her, hurt her feelings—I feel bad about that. She was just trying to help. But I don’t want help; I want you. Nothing anybody can say or do—the therapist the hospice people made me call, the priest who put you in the ground, our friends, your family, the people on TV—can give me what I want, what I need right now. They all want to help me deal with losing you, to which I say, fuck that. I don’t want to deal with it. I want it not to be true. I want you to be here, for you not to be dead. I need that. Now is when I want denial; now is when I want you to pretend, want your illness to be secret, something we refuse to admit could be real.

  Anyway…after your sister left with your mama today to go back to Atlanta, I kept thinking about what she had said, that if I prayed to you, I could say things that were left unsaid. She said she prayed to you a lot. And I kept thinking about it. That’s what I do since you’ve been out of town, so to speak. I think. I couldn’t pray to you. I could never see you as a saint. But I could write you letters like I used to do whenever we would have to be apart. Remember the shameless porn I wrote to you when you left me for Alison that time? Do you remember anything? Is the place where you are someplace that lets you remember? Are you any place at all?

  So much to say to you…so many times I wanted to tell you things, stupid, sentimental things. I love you. No one understood me ever the way you did from the first night we met. The line of hair on your stomach drove me crazy. Your mouth tasted like home. I would want to say this stuff in those last months when we were still pretending. I would come into the apartment from the rain and find you painting or wake up in the middle of the night and hear the TV in the living room and know you were awake, waiting for the pain pill to kick in. And this stuff would come bubbling up, and I would almost say it. But I knew you would know why I was saying it, that I would never come right out and say such things to you unless I knew you were dying. And you weren’t ready for us to know, ready to admit that it was true. At least that’s what you said, what we agreed. Maybe I shouldn’t have believed you. Maybe you really did do it for me.

  Jake, my darling, that would really suck.

  By the time you were ready, it was too late. I would look into your eyes, and you were already gone. I’m so sorry about the pain, my love. So very, very sorry…I would have done anything to make it stop.

  God, this is so fucking pointless. God, please give him back.

  Your fucked-up, ever faithful wife,

  Laura

  Dear Jake,

  Jason came to the apartment today to catalog your studio. I think he was shocked. I haven’t really done anything since we went to the hospital. It’s not a mess—or any more a mess than it was when you left. I haven’t painted anything; I haven’t worked at all. I can’t even imagine myself working without feeling sick. The day of your funeral, I called my agent and told him I couldn’t do the Rapunzel book I kept pretending I was going to do the whole time you were so sick. I just don’t see myself painting any pretty princess pictures ever again. Happily ever after is not something that inspires me.

  I’m not wallowing in filth or anything. I’ve cleaned the bathroom and kept the dishes washed. I haven’t cooked anything, even in the microwave, so there hasn’t been much to wash. I’ve taken out the garbage. I even recycle, believe it or not. The hospice people came and got their stuff, the IV stand and the monitors, and I let them take all the syringes and stuff, too. But the bed is still in the living room, stripped and cranked up. It looks like I’m waiting for my patient to come home. Your meds are still in the refrigerator. Your robe is still hanging on the bedroom door. I’ve considered putting it on, but I don’t want the smell to go away.

  Jason went through everything very respectfully. He was very impressed with your sketchbooks. He wants to talk about compiling and publishing them at some point. He actually wanted to take them with him when he left, but I wouldn’t let him, and he didn’t press. I trust him; it isn’t that. I mean, come on, it’s Jason. I’m just not ready to let them out of the apartment yet.

  I did let him photograph the paintings that were finished. Someone from the gallery is supposed to come back and crate them up and take them to the gallery at some point after I get them all varnished. Jason offered to do it, of course, but I wouldn’t let him. I don’t think he realized how massive they would be. You really never said a word to him about them, did you? Thanks, baby. I love you for that. I love that no one else got to look at them standing beside you but me.

  He loved them, of course. He cried from the moment he walked into the studio. He told me that he loved you and hugged me, and I think I smiled. I know I hugged him back.

  He was most excited about the last one, the one you haven’t finished…that you didn’t finish. He really wanted to photograph it, too, and include it in the show. I told him no. He really fought me for it, much more than he fought me for the notebooks. He pointed out how good it is, that it deserves to be seen. He said the gallery would be able to charge more for it than any of the others. I said, “Because Jake dropped dead painting it?” I showed him the streak on the canvas where you fell. He looked at me like I was insane, the way people always used to look at Mama. He said I should let him take it with him right that moment just to get it out of the apartment, that it wasn’t healthy for me to hang on to it. I told him to fuck off.

  After he was gone, I looked around at all of it, all over the apartment, trying to remember that last night, remember you leaving. Maybe it’s a mercy that I don’t, but it scares the hell out of me. I remember waking up on the couch, you waking me to tell me you needed to paint. God, I was pissed—I was so tired. I wanted to tell you to fuck off and go to sleep. But I didn’t, baby. At least give me credit for that. I remember being shocked at how steady you were once I got you into the studio, how steady your hand was, how beautiful the work was. You had been out of it so long; I had assumed you were done, that you would never paint again. I remember standing behind you while you painted, leaning on a stool, ready to catch you if you fell. But when you did, I didn’t.

  After that, I don’t really remember anything. Not until afterwards, the hospital and all those other people. The last moments we were together, just us…it must have been awful. I get flashes, mostly in my sleep, and they make me sick. Was I really so angry? I must have been horrible to you. Or maybe
not; maybe I just froze completely. Damn it, why can’t I just remember? It was less than a week ago; how can it all have just disappeared out of my head? How can you just be gone?

  But we covered that already.

  Love you, baby

  Laura

  Dear Jake,

  Writing fast tonight; it’s snowing again. By morning, the whole city will be buried. They’re already saying no one should go out.

  I got rid of the stuff. Last night when I came home from the cemetery, I took all the hospital stuff and piled it on the bed—the drugs and the linens and the bedpans and all of those stupid fucking books and videos they gave us to teach us how to cope and the little green New Testament the nun gave me that last night in the hospital and all the pudding cups and gelatin and saltine crackers—all the stuff that never should have been brought into our apartment in the first place. I piled it on that ugly-ass hospital bed and shoved it out the door. When I got it out of the apartment, I rolled it down the hallway, all the way down to the stairs at the end. I slammed the metal door to the stairwell open and shoved the metal bed through it, tipped it, sent it careening down the concrete steps. It had to have sounded like an earthquake all over the building. And I was crying, sobbing, pitching a fit as I did it. I pushed it all the way to the bottom, running down and shoving it every time it stopped, four floors and eight flights, all that racket at ten o’clock at night.

  And no one came to see what I was doing. Not one soul came into the stairwell, not even the superintendent. I pushed the bed outside into the alley and threw all the stuff that had fallen off of it behind it, and the only person who spoke to me at all was a crazy homeless lady. “You throwing that away?” she asked. I nodded—I must have looked as whacked out of my mind as she did. “Can I have it?” I nodded again. I stood there in the cold with no coat or shoes on, watching her go through it all, watching her suck your cherry gelatin straight from the cup.

  God, baby, how did we get here? What are we doing in a place so cold? Is it cold where you are now? Is it burning hot? I can’t stop thinking about that, wondering if you’re in hell. I don’t want to believe hell is real. After all those years with Mama, I want to think it’s all a fake, the ravings of a bunch of crazy people just like her. But she raised me to believe it’s true, and what if she was right? Or what if she wasn’t? What if you’re nowhere at all?