The Angel of the Abyss

by Hank Schwaeble

  “Well, there you go. I don't watch Oprah.”

  Amy tossed her hands up off the steering wheel, brought them back down with a slap. “Seriously, Hatcher, how do you not know her? You've tracked down every medium, mystic and channeler in the country, it seems. I've seen you hand over a ten-thousand-dollar check to a tarot reader.”

  She still called him Hatcher, especially when she was riled up about something. It occurred to him the only time she called him Jake was when they were making love. He liked it. Something about it summed up their dynamic, he just wasn't sure what.

  “I've stayed away from celebrities in my research. I always figured if I was going to have any luck, it would be with someone who avoided the limelight. What do you know about her?”

  “Not much more than what I said. She's got her own show, makes lots of TV appearances. I think she's based in Vegas. I'm pretty sure she has her own line of products. Incense, stuff like that. Why do you think a demon would say her name? I mean, if people go to a medium to talk to the other side, why would the other side send you to a medium when you're face-to-face with one of them?”

  “That's a damn good question,” Hatcher said. He shifted in his seat to stare out the window, watching the dark line of Kentucky woodlands swim by. “I suggest we head to Vegas in the morning and ask her.”

  Chapter 3

  Gabriel was not sure whether he was the only one who saw the Darkness drawing ever closer, but he didn't think the Normans could, so he knew better than to say anything about it. He knew better than to tell them anything, and there really was no one else, anyway, which meant he had no choice but to keep it to himself. The only time he was out of their sight was when he was in the camper, which was almost always, and he couldn't remember the last time he so much as met someone they hadn't introduced to him, and he never saw those people more than once. Even those conversations were invariably in the Normans' presence, a man or a woman sitting across from him with malice in their eyes, looking him over like he was for sale, asking him questions that, until recently at least, made no sense, then saying something to the Normans that made even less, the words alien to him, as if English were occasionally a foreign language.

  He'd been learning it, though, this alien version of the language. Perhaps that's why the visits had stopped.

  The camper was cool, crepuscular slants of morning light brightening it unevenly through the cruddy awning windows. He lay there on the thin mattress in the bunk space tucked into the recess above the cab of the pick-up truck, and stared through the narrow window nearest him. The Darkness had never been this close before. But he felt silly for thinking that – even though it was undeniably true – because that was always the case. Every day it was closer than it had ever been before, and it had been that way since he'd first noticed it over a year and a half ago. A relentless nightfall, one that spanned years instead of minutes, descending bit by bit, an erosion of light darker than mere night, visibly encroaching from the east even in the blackest hour, an invading force, advancing without pause, the expanding edge of a moonless ebony sky. As obvious as the sun it was defying, the moon it was rejecting. But maybe, he thought, only to him.

  And now it was very close indeed. Like another sun, an invisible one, had just set, the cosmos being drained of something vital, its color leaching to the horizon.

  There were voices coming from the cab. He rolled over and hung his head off the side to listen, a trick of acoustics they'd never discovered because they were never in the camper when anyone was sitting in the truck, and even if they had been it only worked if you put your ear against the shell just right.

  They were talking about food. Something about needing to feed him, Mr Norman griping, Mrs Norman saying they had no choice and that a motel for the night would cost all they had left. It was true, he was hungry. His stomach was wambling, pockets of gas gliding and stretching and popping inside him. They usually gave him a burger or something for lunch, some kind of microwaveable meal for dinner with a plastic fork. But there had been no burger yesterday. And now he could hear them talking about money, and how low they were, and then the rustling of the map. He knew what that meant even before he heard the rattling of the cup and the click-clack spilling of its contents. He pulled back and stared at the camper-shell ceiling a few feet above him. Somebody would die, and then they would have money again. Enough for a motel and food. They certainly would not sleep in the camper.

  How long had this been going on? He wasn't sure how old he was, but he guessed around ten, if not already eleven. He measured time by television news programs that gave the date, and he coupled that with a memory of a birthday cake topped with a candle shaped like a four, his mother telling him to blow it out as she leaned over, tucking strands of her black hair behind her ear and away from the face he could not quite see in his mind's eye.

  There was a tiny TV in the camper, a small awkward box with rabbit ear antennae connected to some digital converter, and he watched it often, especially the kids' shows on PBS. If the Normans knew, they didn't seem to care. He assumed it was because they thought it occupied him, kept him quiet. They didn't realize it was how he had learned things, that it was the way he'd taught himself to read the books he'd found in the storage compartment beneath the mattress, the one they didn't know about, the space where he also found the packets of photos of a man and a woman in various places around the country who didn't look at all like the Normans.

  The books were almost all paperbacks. Mysteries, mostly. A few about space travel and aliens. Two that exhorted people to take control of their lives and succeed. He read and reread those more times than he could count, those and anything the Normans would leave behind on the tiny dinette or in a drawer or in the garbage. Books and magazines and newspapers. The pocket dictionary most of all. That, and a Bible. The Normans definitely didn't know about that.

  He'd known the alphabet when they'd taken him. His mother had taught him. Floppy puppets on TV spelling words out gave him enough over a few years to work with, and the books became more and more accessible each time he went through them, until he could finally read them without much pausing.

  Ten years old. If that were true, he'd been with them almost six years. Almost six years, and the darkness almost overtaking them. He knew that was no coincidence, that number. He just had to figure out what to do about it.

  He didn't hate them. Not anymore. There was a while that he did, when that secret rage of emotion was all that fueled him, when he dreamed of how he would bide his time until he would kill them, but he was past that now. He'd replaced it with something more akin to determination. He'd read that in one of the books, that hate was negative, and how emotions were only valuable if they were turned into action, that action was thought put into motion, and that to be effective action had to be the product of reason. He'd thought about that long and hard, and decided he would have to turn his hate into a tool of motivation, one of the building blocks of success. It wasn't as difficult as he'd expected. Now, he hardly thought of it as hate at all.

  But even before the hate, he'd kept his feelings hidden. He had been so scared at first, taken by these strange, older people with gray hair and dour faces who told him over and over that his mother was dead and that they were going to protect him, that they were his only chance, that he had to listen to everything they said and do everything they told him to do or the Bad Men would come for him.

  Eventually the fear gave way to mistrust, but even that had its limits, the yearnings of a boy his age only so controllable. He'd made the mistake of forcing a complaint once, making a stand about wanting to play with other children. They'd driven by a playground, one he'd seen from the window, and the longing had been too much. Kids chasing each other around log structures and climbing and sliding and swinging. He'd watched children play with each other on TV all the time, unable to remember ever having done it himself.

  The Normans would let him
out to stretch every couple of days or so, and would even give him a ball or cheap toy every now and then when they did, but it was always in some remote area of woods, far from any highways or buildings or people. They'd told him it was too dangerous, that the Bad Men who were out to get him might find him. But he'd been stubborn about it this time, whining and pleading and refusing to let it go. He’d screamed and pounded the wall while they drove, battered them with demands for an explanation when they came back to shut him up, a reason why there was never anywhere to go, any place other children were that the Bad Men weren't. They simply put his food on the table and stared at him as he groused, stone faces across the fold-out dinette, occasionally looking at each other, information passing silently between them that he couldn't interpret.

  The next day, he found himself in the woods again, but this time the truck was parked next to a family in a tent. A man with a beard and a woman with thin hair and knobby knees and smile lines around her mouth. They had two boys, one seemed a bit older than Gabriel, the other a little younger. They played for hours, running through the woods – though never out of sight of the camp – turning over rocks to see the bugs and throwing sticks like spears. Even the younger boy knew so much that Gabriel didn't. But they only made fun of him a little.

  When the sun started to set, Mr Norman called him back, told him to go into the camper and stay there, that they were leaving. Gabriel could still remember the two boys saying ‘bye’, still saw their father looking a bit surprised, still heard his voice saying how they were going to grill some steaks. But Mr Norman said no, and gave Gabriel a stern command.

  Mrs Norman took him into the camper and sat there at the table, watching him the whole time. She didn't even blink when the woman screamed, or when the boys cried out Dad! and Mom! and other confused shouts Gabriel couldn't quite make out. The sounds stopped after a minute or two. The door to the camper-shell opened and Mrs Norman got up and walked out, looking at him until she reached the door, and stepped down. Mr Norman stood there in the opening without entering, staring, feet on the ground, his gray hair lower than eye level.

  “You got what you wanted,” he said. He raised a large knife and wiped the blood off of it with a rag. “Any time you want to do that again, this is how it will be.” He twisted the knife in the air, making sure Gabriel got the point. “Understand?”

  Gabriel swallowed, still having a hard time comprehending, though part of him had known exactly what was going to happen the moment he'd left the boys and sat down in the camper, the moment Mrs Norman’s eyes settled on his. Eyes that saw things, eyes that hid things, eyes that concealed things scarier than he wanted to imagine.

  “Do you understand?” the old man repeated. “I want you to say it.”

  “Yes.”

  The man stared at him for a few more beats, then shut the door.

  Gabriel heard the latch, the padlock, the tug-check. He sat there in the dark, tried to process the new reality. Over the following hours, realizations emerged, collapsing into each other. He'd always believed they had been lying about his mother being dead, was certain they were. Now he knew the lie was even worse, because it was true, all true, only in a different way. He also became aware, suddenly, of the camper. Of the various things he'd found, the books, the Bible, hadn't been forgotten by the prior owners. They were dead, too.

  The truck engine started up, and Gabriel felt the mattress vibrating beneath him. He teetered as the truck backed up, wobbled in place as it shifted into drive and accelerated.

  He thought of the two boys again before letting go of the memory to get back to his book. He pictured their faces, the younger boy smiling and waving, the older one giving a sneer that was still friendly as he flashed his palm, too cool to wave. Gabriel had often suspected, often accused himself of knowing what was going to happen even before he'd been ordered back into the camper, of knowing as soon as Mr Norman had given him that cold, curt nod when he'd asked him if it was all right to play with them. Of knowing, and not caring. That maybe the blackness was coming for him and him alone, if it hadn't, perhaps, been created by him on that dark day when the sun was so bright and the forest so green.

  That was three years, eleven months and twenty eight days ago. He'd been keeping a precise count ever since. He knew how long the Darkness had been creeping; when he'd first noticed it, gathering like a storm. He would be prepared, because success was the result of preparation meeting opportunity, and he knew, knew at a level he could feel in his bones that this was definitely an opportunity. A storm was coming, only it wasn't weather approaching, turning the Heavens dark, as if God were closing his eyes.

  It was a Reckoning.

  Chapter 4

  Micah stroked the patchwork fur of the tiny calico kitten as it mewled, shushing it. “This is the only one of the litter that survived,” he said, his voice melancholy.

  The words echoed a bit off the sloped stone walls of the large chamber. Even with all the cages, rows and rows of them stacked as high as the footstool would allow, it was unsettlingly dark, as always, since there were no windows. Tiny cage bulbs glowing here and there, three dim lamps burning on tables spaced far and randomly apart.

  Jonah wished his brother would turn on more lights – there was no shortage of them – but he seemed to prefer it that way, little puddles of illumination, like scattered islands. It was as if Micah saw darkness as his ally, his partner, the shadows as his arena. Which, Jonah supposed, was more or less true. Strange that someone who rarely slept preferred the dark. Or maybe, Jonah realized, that was why he did.

  “The mother was in bad shape when you took her in,” Jonah said.

  “They all are, in one way or another. There would no point otherwise.”

  Micah kissed the kitten on the head. It continued to mewl. That caused other creatures to stir in the shadows. Metal lightly rattled, cedar bedding rustled. Jonah tried to remember how many animals there were, but it was hard to keep an accurate count. More were always being added. There were over a hundred, that much he knew. Mesh cages stacked as high as would fit, stretching out along every cavern wall.

  “How long?”

  “Two or three days,” Jonah said. At that angle, with the view he had of Micah's features, he couldn't help but notice how much he resembled their father, more than Jonah ever would. Even more remarkable, Micah was already older looking than Jonah remembered the man. More mature. But he had the same narrow face, the same light, thinning hair, combed straight back. The same look in his pale eyes that made you wonder if he even saw you. “Maybe less.”

  Micah nodded. He stood in front of the tank and looked down through the screen top. Even from a few feet away, Jonah could feel the heat from the lamp positioned directly over it. One of the puddles of illumination.

  “It's not too late to change plans,” the young man added. “We can still call it off.”

  Micah pressed his mouth into a disapproving smile, gave a little shake of his head toward Jonah before turning back to face the tank. “Why on Earth would I want to do that? This might be our only chance.”

  Jonah did not expect the question. “I just... I'm not sure we're ready. I assumed you – we – needed more time.”

  “Of course we're not ready. We'll never be ready, not in the sense you mean.”

  “I don't understand.”

  Another smile, this one down into the tank. “No, Jonah. I don't expect you would.”

  Jonah didn't respond. He looked at Micah for a moment, eyes lingering, then let his gaze drop to his shoes.

  “Please, Jonah,” Micah said. “Hurt feelings are evidence of pretensions. The only person who can bruise an ego is the owner of it.”

  “I really wish you would just listen to me sometimes. You take in these people like they're stray pets. You've got a following now, people expecting things from you. We don't know hardly any of them.”

  Micah let out a b
reath, seemed to arrive at a decision. He often did, quickly and suddenly. Sometimes several in the time it took to exhale. “If I were to stick my hand in here, what do you think would happen?”

  Jonah looked into the tank. He could just make out the shadow of the serpent hiding in the large hollowed-out section of log, head weaving slowly. It was a big tank.

  “I don't know. Strike you, I suppose.”

  “Of course he would. There has been enmity between man and snake since the Garden of Eden. Sums things up rather poetically, I would say. Satan takes the form of a serpent to tempt Eve, God banishes her and Adam for defying Him, but does He stop there? Of course not. True deterrence must go further than the mere just. He curses snakes, makes them slither along the ground, instills in mankind the eternal impulse to crush them under heel. As if the snake is to blame for Lucifer’s guise. A cautionary tale that survives because of its very unfairness. It does make you wonder what they were like before though, doesn’t it? When they had legs?”

  Jonah said nothing.

  “Do not be upset. I don’t take you for granted. I just don’t think you understand how important it is that I find answers. Whatever these people expect, I can’t give it to them until I do.” Micah paused. Another decision made. “Come here.”

  With only a slight hesitation, Jonah stepped forward. “Lift this lid for me and hold it.”

  Jonah swallowed hard and removed the screen top of the tank.

  “Now, watch.”

  Micah gave the kitten a kiss on its head as it mewled, the sound high-pitched and loud and repetitive. The kitten squirmed a bit as his brother lowered it into the tank and placed it on the opposite end from the hollowed out log. The mewling sounded weak and frail coming from the tank.

  The kitten tried to hang on to Micah's hand, but couldn't. It sat on the substrate of cypress mulch and tried to get its footing, picking up and shaking its paws to shed the shavings.