Mercy, A Gargoyle Story

by Misty Provencher

  “I thought you were done. You’re not moving in, because you have to take care of your mom, even though she lives right across the street from me. I got it,” he says, but I hear how he has to swallow between sentences. I know that feeling of having something stuck in your throat, like a huge boa constrictor, coiled up over your collarbone on the way down – even though it’s only a bubble of air, holding all the words you can’t say. That feeling was there when The Boy said it’d be good to get rid of my little bean, there again when the doctor asked me if I was ready for the procedure, and it almost climbed it’s way back out of my mouth, when The Boy didn’t ask me to marry him, but broke up with me instead. I know exactly how much that swallowing hurts.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “No, no you didn’t mean to do that.” He swallows again. “It’s no big deal. I’m sure we’ll see each other around, since you live right across the street. We could probably double date.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about, right there.”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry, that it’s not personal, and you keep turning it into you against me. I don’t want it to be like that between us. I care about you.”

  “I can see that, by the way you’re dumping me.”

  Ayla’s voice becomes sharp. “Now wait,” she says. “Isn’t that what happened with you and Maddy? Isn’t it? You really liked her, but you didn’t have the right feelings for her, so you broke up with her?”

  “Now don’t throw that in my face.”

  “I’m just trying to explain. You’ve felt the way I do before. You should know it’s nothing personal.”

  “You’re right. It’s not personal at all. Maybe I’ll just go string myself up from the rafters tonight.”

  “Don’t talk like that!”

  “What do you care? It’s nothing personal,” he sneers. I creep forward and peek at them from the shadows of the stairwell closet. Ayla’s back is to me, but The Boy is in clear view. His lips are curled and his brow slices down over his eyes, until it nearly meets in the middle. He is so ugly and so vulnerable in this second that he rivals any gargoyle I’ve seen. This is what pain looks like, when it is right at the surface.

  And the ashen snow falling on my heart becomes an avalanche. I see The Boy as something I never have before. As just a boy. All the moments of watching him in his apartment, answering his phone, or eating his dinner in front of the TV—all of them suddenly stitch together and reveal him. He’s the same as anybody who eats, talks, moves around, and tries to steal a few rungs on the dating ladder. He’s just a boy who liked me, but didn’t love me, and didn’t know how else to tell me.

  And I suddenly want Ayla to care about him. I want her to tell him not to do anything foolish. I want her to wrap him in her arms and say that everything will be okay, that she could love him, that she would try. I want this moment to be the fairy tale ending that begins a perfect new life for them, where this ordinary boy learns how to be a prince and this everyday princess falls for him.

  But Ayla says, “You’re such a douche, Adam. Don’t make this into your pity party.”

  The pain evaporates and his distilled anger bubbles into rage. He leaps toward her, draws his hand back, and brings it across her face so hard that the slap echoes on the rooftop.

  Any pity I had for Adam evaporates.

  I lumber out from behind the closet, leaving Trickle behind, and the roof trembles beneath my feet. My ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend both turn to see me coming at them, Ayla holding her cheek, and Adam’s face as pale as the moon.

  “You will not hit her!” I roar. The two are frozen. I am in his face, the plate of my mask close to his nose, in seconds. “You will not hit her!”

  Adam squeaks, “Oh my God.”

  “What is that?” Ayla breathes. She is suddenly beside him, both hands clinging to his arm instead of her face. Seeing the lines between his fingers show up on her cheek, despite the darkness, infuriates me. My insides move like a ship thrown in the ocean, not knowing which of them infuriates me more, Adam for everything that has happened between us, or Ayla, for clinging to his arm, even after he’s hit her. I realize that they should never be together. She doesn’t love him and he doesn’t love her nearly enough, to raise a hand to her like he’s done. In that second, the solution becomes clear to me. It is not jealousy that drives it, but an understanding from deep inside. These two imperfect people, who I once loved so much, will never be perfect together. They need to move on in their lives, past the Madeline-tragedy that keeps them together. They need to find their own ways on their own. They need to be separated and I have an idea about how to make that happen.

  Instead of attack or explanation, I bow low before The Boy.

  “You called me, Master,” I say. Adam stumbles backward, nearly knocking Ayla over with him. I’m not sure if it is just my voice that shocks him most or my actual words and their meaning.

  “What are you talking about? I’m not your master,” he stammers.

  “You summoned me and I’m here. I am your faithful demon, Master. What will you have me do?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” The Boy trips backward again, as Ayla lets go of his arm and shrieks, “What is it talking about?”

  “Is it to kill again, Master?” I ask. Ayla goes bone-white, so the finger marks on her cheek become more prominent, making it look like she’s been clawed with shadows. She stumbles backward, away from Adam, while keeping her eyes on me.

  “You killed Madeline?” Ayla whispers to The Boy.

  “No, I didn’t!”

  “Master,” I say, craning toward Ayla. “This one?”

  “No!” Ayla shrieks. “Get away from me! Call it off, Adam! Selene is right!”

  He takes a step toward her, his eyes flicking back and forth between her and me.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he pleads, reaching for her. She ducks away and makes a wide circle around me, as she skitters toward the stairway door.

  “Stay away from me, Adam!” she howls, breaking away in a sprint. No one stops her. She disappears through the door in seconds.

  Adam and I look at one another. I step forward and he takes one back. We are too close to the edge of the building. I move back, but he doesn’t close the gap. He keeps his spine against the ledge, holding tight to it.

  “What are you?” he asks. He looks like he’s going to vomit.

  “I am not here to destroy your life,” I say. He doesn’t look comforted. I pity him again, this imperfect boy, with his horrible violence and his overwhelming guilt. I see the trail of his mistakes, like a parade that continues to become more complex and more wretched, as he walks through his life.

  “Sit down,” I say, and after glancing around the roof at his options of escape, Adam slides down beneath the ledge, huddling with his knees close to his chest. When he is down and seems to be breathing again, I say, “I don’t mean to scare you, but I’m going to anyway. I am not a demon. I am Madeline.”

  Adam’s eyes widen to the size of boulders, then they roll up toward the sky and his head wobbles, right before he passes out.

  ***

  I lean over Adam and the roof begins to shake. I glance up to see Trickle bounding straight at me with a vicious snarl. The lion’s stone incisors are huge and bright in the moonlight and I stumble backward, frightened as to what he sees that I don’t. Maybe a gargoyle from the other roof is standing behind me, about to attack.

  I scramble backward, looking for my attacker, as Trickle soars over me and lands over the top of Adam. The lion’s massive body knocks me across the roof and out of the way. His roar rattles the plate on my face. I jump to my feet, searching for an enemy, but I don’t spot a threat. Trickle’s enormous, stone feet are planted on either side of the unconscious boy and the lion’s tail flicks aggressively as he lowers his head. His eyes are narrowed on me and it is obvious that our friendship is secondary to the instinct that has take
n over.

  “Don’t hurt him, Trickle!” I shriek.

  “MINE!” the lion roars in return. I stumble backward another two steps in disbelief. “You will not tempt him to fling himself from the rooftop by revealing your form! You will not shock him to his death! He is mine!”

  I waver with the words. Adam is Trickle’s recipient? The idea is like the wrong key in the door of my thoughts. Selene was supposed to be Trickle’s recipient, I was sure of it. How can it be Adam? Why isn’t Adam my recipient?

  “Yours?” I stammer. “He was my boyfriend...he was the father of my son.”

  “He is mine!” the lion snarls. “I will heal him, while I can see and while he can not refuse! I see his pride! I see it. What is within me is what I can see in him now! He will accept my gift and his guilt will be healed! Leave! Now! You will not bring the shame back upon him by revealing yourself!”

  “His guilt is more important than Selene’s cancer? Why aren’t we healing the people who really need it?”

  “We are,” the lion growls with a hard flick of his tail. With a final snarl, Trickle says, “Go.”

  My feet turn me away and I walk to the edge of the roof, but when I stand on the lip, I realize my only way back is to crawl. I don’t want to return to the other rooftop at all. I turn to see Trickle thrust his heart into Adam’s chest and something inside me loses its grip. Adam, healed of me, means that I am alone in this now. The healing severs my last tie. I don’t have my life to keep living, to return to. I sink into the depths of my loneliness.

  As I crumble, Moag’s massive claws scoop me up, and carry me away from my past and back to my future.

  ***

  “Lucky, you are, Slip,” Moag whispers to me. “He sends me for you again.”

  The mighty gargoyle doesn’t bother to land on my rooftop, but drops me, so I splatter at Truce’s feet. I lay there, in the center of the gargoyle swarm, their voices like sharp gravel, as they grumble around the outskirts of the building, insisting on my answer.

  “Madeline?” Truce’s voice is ten layers below all the gargoyles’ and I look up at him. “Since you left the choosing, we are no longer bound to answer your questions in truth, but now you must answer ours. We are all awaiting your decision.”

  The King, who generally avoids any direct contact with my hideous, gray skin, puts out his hand to me. The gargoyle’s voices jump up as I reach for it.

  He’s allowing her to see him! they say.

  No fair!

  The gargoyle suitors are at a disadvantage!

  She should be made human and then choose!

  Shut up, I want to hear what she says! She shall see him!

  I don’t understand until the moment our fingers touch and Truce suddenly blooms into my veins. There is no block. His thoughts, dreams, and fears flood me and confuse the pattern of the ash swirling around my heart. The ash jumps up and falls down, it blows and spouts and swirls like water in a drain.

  It is hard to separate all the emotions when they come so fast, piling up with my own. Despair, joy, sorrow, and guilt, his same feelings fall in line beside mine. We’ve felt so many of the same things, but for different reasons. The kingdom tugs at him, the sorrow of his past weighs him down, and maybe worst of all, there is a crushing loneliness that stifles even the sporadic workings of my body.

  I didn’t expect to find that in him or to feel it like I do. His ache for companionship reaches for me, screams for me, with an ache so deep that I want to give into it, just to make it stop. And then, from the bottom of all of it, rises up the very essence of him in a mist.

  I breathe in the particles I see in my mind and my head fills with it – a rejuvenation of fresh air, first snow, or new rain, a first kiss. It is an exhilarating breath, leaving me at the top of a mountain, overlooking everything in the world of him, with new eyes.

  “You,” I say, before my mind can completely return to its senses. He lets go of my hand and the emotions that came with his touch stream out of me at once.

  “Yes,” he says, with the gaze that erases everything, but the two of us. A small, relieved smile plays at his lips. “Me.”

  Jaibu rushes forward and Moag dips out of the sky, talons bared toward the panther. Jaibu halts before Truce and I.

  “Fair would be to make her human again and let us have a look at what we are getting,” the panther says. “And to make us human, so she can properly choose her king.”

  “What good is a look, if she wants neither of you?” Truce counters.

  “I would know her actual worth,” Jaibu growls. Kervus beats his wings so that he bobbles up from the roof a foot.

  “You touched her!” he whines.

  “Of course. My touch shows her who I am,” Truce agrees. “I am the one at a disadvantage. As a gargoyle, she knows who you are already.”

  “She knows who we are as gargoyles only,” Jaibu says. “She does not know what lengths I would go to protect her. To find love with her.”

  “If she is a beauty,” Truce finishes for him. Jaibu grunts.

  “If she is ugly beneath it all, I may still fight for her.”

  “To gain the kingdom, until you found the right time to kill me,” I say, turning on the panther. “My exterior is your only concern. I don’t need you to decide whether or not my beauty is worthy of you. Yours is not worthy of me.”

  “Spoken as a woman who does not know how to hold her tongue,” Jaibu spits.

  “Spoken as a foolish servant, who may be ruled by a woman with her loose tongue.” I snap back. Jaibu growls, but neither of us looks away from one another, until Kervus wobbles up between us, brushing Jaibu’s face with a thick, awkward wing. Jaibu swats the grotesque away, but Kervus does his best to regain his composure and hover closer to me.

  “My Queen,” his slimy whisper makes me cringe. “Remember our agreement?”

  “There was no agreement. You tried to barter with something you didn’t have,” I say, which reminds me not only of what I want, but that I may be able to attain it even without Truce’s help. I shout, turning in a circle, “Where is my son? Is my son here?”

  But Jaibu shouts over me, to Truce, “Reveal her!”

  Kervus frowns, sputtering out of the way as Jaibu stomps around the roof edge, motioning to the gargoyle crowd, as if he’s throwing piles of voices up into the air. The gargoyle voices rise with his arms. Jaibu is conducting an orchestra that calls for anarchy.

  Reveal her! Reveal her! The gargoyles shout is raucous thunder.

  The call for my son is drowned out beneath the monsters.

  “I regret,” Truce murmurs in my ear, “that I must reveal you, Madeline. They are calling for it and they may tear us to pieces if I do not.”

  “But then I have to marry one of you,” I jump away from his hypnotic gaze. “If I’m not a gargoyle, I don’t have the option of healing my recipient and moving on.”

  But I realize then, that if my son and I are both gargoyles, he cannot be my recipient. My head spins with it. How can that be, that I cannot heal the child I harmed? Truce’s eyes fall along with his lips.

  “You haven’t chosen one of us already?” he asks. I steady myself. Having felt what courses through him, I struggle to feel what my mind lays out for me. It doesn’t change that this man was once a murderer. That his temperament may not be reliable past the moment that I sampled it.

  “I’ve chosen to be with my son.”

  “I can get you your son,” Truce pleads. His arms reach out and my shriveled heart gives a sudden, hard jerk inside me. I stumble with it, reaching my hands through my ribs. Truce’s face twists in concern. “Madeline?”

  I push my claws between my ribs and clutch the dehydrated organ. I secure my grip and pluck my heart free, right in my palm. I pull it from my chest, as if it has been attached all along by nothing more than a strand of a spider’s web. Truce and I gape at it, the small, dark thing, in the middle of my hand.

  My heart suddenly flutters a beat and pain ripples through me,
as if I’ve been slammed against a boulder. After a second hesitant beat, I realize that my gift is a hot potato that needs to be placed. Another beat, and I am sure that the gift will blow me to pieces if I don’t deposit it quickly.

  I turn to Truce. His eyes remain on the burnt offering in my hand.

  “No,” he whispers. “It can’t be. There is no other human on the roof.”

  I turn and search, expecting to find Selene hiding in a shadow with her pipe clutched in her hands, but he’s right. Besides him, there are only gargoyles on the roof.

  “Is it you?” I ask, stepping toward the King. Moag swoops down between us with a vehement hiss. The heart beats again, this time throwing my head back and dragging a painful roar from deep inside me. I bring the gift closer to me so I won’t drop it, and as it comes closer, my chest pulls, as if it is drawn to the shriveled pepper in my hand.

  “Let me change your form, Madeline!” Truce shouts. He raises his hands as I cradle the heart closer to me, like an infant. My chest sucks at the dead organ and another beat shudders my entire body.

  It can’t be.

  If the heart wants what I think it does, it also means that I will not have my son.

  But I cannot resist it. The pain insists upon it.

  Truce is only a foot away, his palms aimed at me. He shouts in a voice strong and deep, “Reform!”

  At the same moment, I thrust my heart back into myself, the dark husk of it snapping in place, like a reverse slingshot. The gargoyle form opens, and I am spewed into the air—as a vapor that dangles over the tarred roof, under Moag, but over my transforming gargoyle body.

  Captured.

  And free.

  I dance there, in the filament, in front of Truce. There is no signal to either stay or go, until the angels arrive, drifting to the right of me like filtered tissue. They motion for me to come and my entire being begs to follow them, but I remain, paralyzed by the forlorn expression on the King’s face. Truce waves a hand over his head, as though he is throwing a hook, and Moag zips away. I drift in the King’s eyes until Moag returns.