A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  “They started with just the beeeeeep of the tone. Then, when you listened, it was more than a beeeeep it was a voice, saying beeeeee at exactly the same pitch and tone as the dialling tone, but still a voice.

  “It said, beeeeee meeeeeee…

  “And then, when you realised that those were the words it was saying, it said more.

  “Beeee meeeee beeeee freeeeee…

  “And by increments, aware that they had an audience, the angels came, and they said at the tone of the telephones, We be…

  … to see…

  set free…

  We be light, we be life, we be fire!

  We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!

  Come be me……

  and be free…

  … we be blue electric angels…

  “Bakker said, ‘Can you hear them?’

  “I said yes.

  “‘What do they say?’

  “‘What they always do.’

  “‘Tell me!’

  “I told him; I confess, I was hypnotised by their sound. When the angels spoke, it was more than voices, it was with a presence that wormed its way into the mind and filled the senses with burning, fiery blueness. They whispered that they were the creatures of the wire, that their playground was the world, that they danced at the speed of light and rippled faster than sound, spread their wings across every wire, voice, mind, sense, sight in the world and when they had bounced from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again through every telephone and computer and radio transmitter on earth, they would bounce into the radio waves in the sky, and spin away into space, circle the moon and then fly on, to see what sights they could see. They asked you to come be me, to be free – to let go of life and join them for ever, playing in the wires.

  “It was a dangerous song – all sorcerers knew of the angels. They had a reputation, that of a young, reckless power that travelled as interference in the system, unexplained spots of static, moved too fast to catch, stop, or begin to understand. They had grown out from the wires only in recent years, but that shouldn’t really surprise us. Where life is, there is always magic, and over the years we pour so much of ourselves, of our lives, into the phone lines – our hearts, dreams, desires, hopes, friends, enemies, hates and loves, tipped into the wire. The angels started off as just a rogue piece of static but, over the years, fed on all that life being thrown at them – telephone conversations, radio broadcasts, internet, email – that unique magic altered them, made them growinto the form that you currently understand as blue electric angels.

  “They relish life, rejoice in it; their whole lives are learning, understanding, a composite of other people’s existences, an idea plucked from Jane merged into a word from Bob and a sigh from Joe; an entire personality can be formed from the throwaway bits of conversation we leave trapped in the wire. They are so proud! So bright and brilliant, the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, the whole of humanity pouring itself into their soul. So beautiful, so bright, they delight in all that is new, feast and feed on it, for it was what made them. They are a child, and a god. All sorcerers love and fear them, for they are very much like the sorcerers are – feasting on all things that they see. Life is magic. And as I have said, too much life … too much of too much… mortals cannot sustain it.

  “They are everywhere at once, thinly spread across the world like flurries of snow; but they can, sometimes, coalesce into one place for a special purpose. In that hospital, that strange night that had been like any other night, Bakker wanted to provoke such an event; he wanted to bring the angels together, and force them out of the phone.

  “I asked why.

  “He didn’t smile, or sigh, or show any sign of emotion when he answered. He simply said, ‘Because they are alive; because they will not die.’

  “I wanted to know how he thought he could get them out of the phone lines that had spawned them.

  “He just laughed and said he was sure that they, if he had judged their character right, would be all too willing to come, for the right incentive. He knew how I had first fallen into sorcery. He knew that as a child, I had loved to listen to the phones, and they had loved to talk to me.

  “What then, I asked? When you have somehow dragged the angels out of the phone line, their natural place, what do you do then?

  “‘Life,’ he said. ‘Just life.’

  “I only understood slowly. Even when he had explained it, I did not wish to comprehend. His plan was to draw the angels out of their natural territory, force them to take a human, physical form with his spells and, once they had achieved such a state, to steal that which made them alive.

  “You must understand – the angels are created from the life that others leave behind in the phones: words thrown out into darkness, ideas left half unsaid. Their whole existence is speed and freedom and wild electric power and magic and life; they feed off humanity’s forgotten thoughts. He said, ‘Their blood is life, Matthew. Their souls are fire.’

  “I finally – too slowly – understood. Bakker didn’t just want to summon the angels. He wanted to become the angels, to be like them, no longer physical, restrained by the bonds of his own crippled body. He wanted to feast on their bright burning blood, become pure electricity and fire in human form, burning his way across the planet – a human consciousness in the form of the angels themselves. But he needed my help.

  “I asked why.

  “He said, ‘I can’t hear them. Things are different, I can’t hear them. I need a sorcerer who can make them come out of the phone lines. I need your help.’

  “I said no. I didn’t even know why I said it; I was so appalled, I just spoke on instinct. I said that his plan would make him inhuman, a deity of blue light rather than a sorcerer, that I knew he must be frightened and in pain, but that what he proposed was nothing short of a bond with an electric devil.

  “He wanted to know why I said no.

  “I couldn’t think of an answer. I couldn’t say what I really thought – that the angels’ whole nature was wild and reckless, and that in his flesh they would only be more so; that I did not trust him with that kind of power.

  “We quarrelled. I think that part was well established after my death. I left there too angry to speak. I felt betrayed. As a child, I had put nothing but faith in Mr Bakker, who had come to my mum’s front door and saved me from the nuthouse. I guess these childish things were suddenly going away.

  “I walked. When I am angry, I often walk to calm myself, look at the river and let it flow through my mind, washing away the fury and dirt in my head. I walked along the river, but I don’t really remember the route I took and had no clear objective.

  “When it came, it was so fast, so sudden that I didn’t even feel its attack. It came out of the pavement at my feet, arms first, claws that lacerated my ankles on their way up as it grew from the darkness around me. It was thinner then, paler, barely more than a shadow itself. I guess it has learnt as the years go by. I didn’t have time to fight: its claws were in my chest, across my back, on my face. It hissed and spat, a breath of rotting teeth, its spit burning my skin where it touched, its movement cloaked in blackness.

  “I will not describe particularly what happened there. I do not think I know much myself, the pain and fear of it was so great. The mind can’t remember pain – the flesh won’t bear it. But it remembers the fear. It remembers remembering agony.

  “I knew that I was going to die, that with every pump of my heart, rapidly failing, blood was pouring out of me in regular, surging gouts. I call ‘it’ – the thing that attacked me – a ‘he’, since, though a creature of magic should not have a gender in the traditional boring human sense of which organ goes where, the face he wore was nonetheless an imitation of warped humanity, recognisable despite its contortions. He walked around me and whispered, ‘So hungry, so hungry,’ in a wheedling voice like a starved snake might have, and dipped his fingers in my blood and sighed in contentment at the taste, cuppi
ng his hand in the pools around me and lapping it up like a cat after milk. I crawled away from him as best I could, crying with the fear and pain of it, utterly helpless. He held my face and stared into my eyes, and said, ‘Give me life!’ I didn’t understand then what he wanted; only later did I realise that he was trying to see what was in me as I died, trying to reach into my mind to follow my senses, see my thoughts and memories.

  “But death wasn’t so cooperative in coming quickly. He let me go with an angry hiss, knowing that I couldn’t crawl far and that death was inevitable, and stalked the small concrete perimeter of the killing ground, looking around at it like a confused child in an art gallery, trying to work out what makes the paintings on the wall worth its attention. While he did this I had crawled to a telephone box. I didn’t know who I thought I’d call – strangely, Bakker was the first number that had leapt to mind, although I didn’t dial.

  “I lifted the receiver. He saw, but only smiled with a mouth full of my blood, and didn’t even bother to try and stop me.

  “I heard the dialling tone and, as I lay there, the phone held to my ear, they came.

  “And we said, come be me…

  “So easy to die…

  “And we said, We be fire, we be light, we be life! We dance electric flame, we skim sense, we be the ocean and the burning and the sunrise and the sunset on the edge of the world, we chase moonlight and sunlight and we do not stop, we cannot be tamed, we be free!

  “And we said, We be the singing in the wire, the whisper of the friend, the static on the line, our dance never begins and never ends, our voices be always heard, invisible silk in the ear, never feared, never alone, we be in every mind and every soul and every mind and every soul be we! Come be we and be free…

  “And I closed my eyes, held the phone to my lips, and with the angels in my ears, allowed myself to die.

  “We caught my dying breath as it entered the phone and held on to it with all our strength. From the tip of the breath we pulled the warmth in the lungs, then the electricity in the nerves, the buzz in the muscles, the movement in the blood, the water in the skin, the colour in the hair, the strength in the bones; we pulled the dying embers of my thoughts, the expiring rhythm of my heart and, dragging me in by my last breath, we dissolved the sorcerer, and made me electric, melting away my original form to nothing more than blue sparks wriggling into the earth. We have always loved life.

  “We have no need for time, in the wire. We were everywhere, everyone, everything; we knew all that we could want to know, and at every instant learnt something new, forgetting nothing. You spray out your ideas and your thoughts and your feelings and your knowledge so fast, every infinity there was something new to explore, an eternally growing world of first-time callers and last-call goodbyes, new papers on new subjects posted on new pages, new feelings towards a new lover whispered down an old line, new links from New York to London, Paris to Berlin, new paths to explore, new sights to see, new worlds to bathe in. There is never an instant in the wire that is not changing, alive; and together we danced in that world, in the richness of the life that others leave behind. You will call it two years that we danced together in the wire, splitting our thoughts to spread out across the face of the earth, pure energy, pure fire. We will not bother with such distinctions. Petty human tongues cannot describe our glory.

  “When the spell came, we were entirely unprepared. At one moment we were riding a billion dollars through Switzerland, and sweeping through the radios of a NASA shuttle about to launch. The next, we were coming into one place, our thoughts becoming one, our senses becoming one; and I was there too, the scattered, formless substance of my nature dragged, with the angels, back into one collective piece. I realised this wasn’t just some nightmare, some horrible reassertion of reality – it was a summoning. Someone was summoning us, and I was being dragged along with it.

  “My presence disrupted the spell. Whoever called us back called only the angels, not me. My influence meant we did not appear where we should have; my mind took us to the place that I regard as home, and piece by piece, as we fell out of the phone like water off a leaf, the blue sparks of our existence formed a shape, a consciousness, a human form, and that form was me. Not how it should have been. We should have been summoned as gods. I should have died. Instead, you see us now as we are. Half-flesh. Human and angel for ever tangled into one soul, inextricable, mortal, eternal, us and I.

  “And your world is terrible as well as beautiful. We are grateful to be me, to have my memories and thoughts and heart and mind; it keeps us from madness. How can you live in this place? How can humans endure it? It is so bright and loud; with each moment, every sense is overwhelmed: colours and noise and the feel of the air in our fingers, the smell of people, and the street and cars and vents and fans and animals and water and weather? How does it not overwhelm you, such endless existence all around you, always changing? We thought we understood life, we thought that we had seen everything that could be known, that our dance across the face of the earth had encompassed all of human being. But sight, and sound; or the simple act of feeling your own heart, knowing that somewhere inside you there’s this fat red organ of lumpy muscle going gu-dunk, gu-dunk, gu-dunk; or tasting food, feeling it burn in the mouth or tingle on the teeth. This world of yours, a world of flesh, is the most amazing, frightening thing we have ever known. We delight in it! The joy of everything, of sense… had we but time or means, we would eat for ever for the wonder of the taste, play for ever in the child’s playground, spend our lives listening to the stories on the stage or screen, devour every book in the library, smell every flower and bin. I have seen this world once before… now we see it again.

  “How can you bear to understand that you will get old and lose this feeling, will die and wither and encounter nothing but dark? How can you bear it? Since we came here, we have been entirely fearful, snatched from our safe, comforting bliss of scattered feeling. But we would not die and leave this amazing place for any price. It is the closest thing to sacred we have ever seen.

  “So, here I am. We were resurrected as one individual, brought back into life fused into a single form. There’s no untangling that knot. True, you can shoot me – I die. But my consciousness is now tied up with ours; and if you have a phone, or a passing radio wave should happen to be overhead, we will crawl back into the wire, and still be me, and still be the blue electric angels. We would have it no other way.”

  —

  I had finished speaking.

  The man scratched at his chin, his nails making a harsh Velcro sound against his skin. He said, “Not entirely what I expected to hear.”

  “And you’re a man of learning.”

  “I don’t know whether it changes my opinion of you. Or, indeed, if it should.”

  “What did you think had happened?”

  “Oh,” he waved his hands. “You quarrelled with Bakker, doubtless over one of his Satanic schemes, walked away, faked your own death, went travelling, discovered some evil mystic art, bonded your soul to a devil for power, glory, et cetera; returned to wreak havoc and revenge… you get the idea?”

  “You don’t have much of an imagination, do you?”

  He smiled tightly. “I don’t know that your story is better than anything I imagined.”

  “Doesn’t innocence help salve my soul?”

  “Technically, you don’t have a soul. You’re a creature of other creatures, a compound of other people’s lives.”

  “And in what way are you more than the flesh you are in and the memories that rule you?” we asked sharply. “Are you not who you are because experience makes you this way? Are we not the same?”

  “I don’t bleed blue blood.”

  “It’s all about oxygen bonding,” I retorted, glancing at Oda, who tilted her chin defiantly back at me, “and we saved Sinclair’s life.”

  “You needed him,” replied the man. “Besides, he is useful but obscene.”

  “He’s long-winded. I don’t
see why that makes him obscene. We had his documents, his information. So do you really think that need is what made us do it? I don’t go around killing random people, and I’m sure as hell not a fan of letting others die.”

  He sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Tell me,” he said, “just this, honestly. If you thought a thing looked prettier in flames, would you really not set it alight?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “I wasn’t asking you.”

  “Oh, get a bloody sense of perspective.”

  He hit me, again. I thought we’d been doing quite well, so the shock and surprise of it, more than the pain, injured me, sent me recoiling back inside my shell. After a moment lying curled around our own unhappiness, we picked ourself up and glared at him.

  He said, “You… blue electric angels… you are children with the power to kill, destroy and burn. You know nothing about life, its rules, norms, laws and understandings, and probably care less. Why should you not set the field on fire for the prettiness of its burning; why should you not kill wherever you go, simply because you can; why should you understand anything that the rest of humanity can?”

  “Because I’m here,” I growled.

  “You are just one man,” he retorted. “The angels are the sum of millions, billions, more than that; although before you start, I do appreciate that your relationship is complicated.”

  “We do not need to… to change anything. This life of yours is wonder enough without us setting it on fire.”

  He smiled, shoulders jerking as if a laugh was brewing, hijacked halfway up his throat. “You really are just a child, aren’t you? A poor little bumbling power, crawling out of the nice safe confines of its telephone line. Utterly ignorant and totally confused. You must be going mad inside that good disguise of yours. But perhaps all you’ll do is drool and gibber, when reality finally takes you down.”

  He paused and sucked in his breath. Overdramatically, I thought. Enjoying his power, perhaps, a bit too much. I felt the dirt between my fingers, the tiny heat of it. Not enough to do anything spectacular. But enough, maybe, to burn out something vital under his skin, before we died.