The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  He opened his mouth as if to say something.

  I jumped out of bed and threw the cover over his still-tumescent embarrassment. “Go back to sleep if you like,” I told him; “I’m taking a shower.”

  Then I skipped out of the room before he could clear his throat and speak.

  I was washing up the pots from our meal the night before when I heard him come into the kitchen. I didn’t look around, but I jammed my hands into the hot water so that he couldn’t see them tremble.

  Egan came up behind me without a word and slipped his arms around my waist, kissing the top of my head, breathing the scent of my hair.

  Goddamn it; to cut him some slack, I’m fairly sure he didn’t know the effect that had on me; my insides doing that flip-flop thing that hurt so good. His own pent-up morning tension had been released already, after all.

  “We need to talk,” he murmured.

  Bastard. I knew it. Here it comes! “How did you sleep?” I said desperately, unable to stop myself leaning back into his embrace, molding to the big sheltering wall of his body.

  “I slept like a baby. Didn’t wake. Didn’t even dream.” His voice was soft, and just the murmur of it in my ear made shivers run all the way down to my sex. “I want to apologize for last night. I was more selfish than I should have been. It’s been, well, a few years, you see… But for what it’s worth, I meant what I said.”

  Selfish? “You need to be selfish way more often,” I told him.

  He sighed, and pressed his lips to my hair. “Oh, Milja,” he said, his voice breaking. “If we’d met in different circumstances, if I was a different man…”

  “Then you wouldn’t be the one I loved.”

  He was silent a moment. Then; “We have a choice.”

  Here it comes. Mr. Rationality. Mr. Consequences. My stomach tightened up like a knotted fist. They were so different, my two loves. Azazel was a creature of appetite and the moment, living for his desires—but Egan lived in the battlemented ivory tower of overthinking, fending off the armies of his libido. Only when he was undermined by illness or exhaustion or drink did he ever fall into recklessness.

  And me? I was much more like Azazel. I went with my gut instinct. None of this would have happened if that hadn’t been the case.

  “Go on.”

  “Choice one. We quit. We take the car and drive somewhere else, and I break my vows and we forget any of this ever happened, for a while. We forget the Fallen. And we live together happily ever after until the day we die, and I love you, and you do your best to love me, though feck knows that’s not always going to be easy. But one day soon there will be a war, an all-out fight between the powers of Heaven and Hell, and I think the Fallen will lose because that is what every single prophecy claims. And your man there will be chained up again for eternity. But in that war the world will be torn apart and thousands, maybe millions, will die. Including us, perhaps. It could literally be the end of the world. So we’ll go down with that ship, on Judgment Day. That’s choice one.”

  “What’s choice two, then?”

  “We go to the Vatican. We go and we try to broker a deal between the Host of Heaven and the Fallen, to put off Armageddon. I can talk to…to the Book Lady, I guess, but a negotiation needs both sides at the table. And for that, I need Vidimus to persuade the archangels.”

  “But you are Vidimus.”

  “Huh. I’m just a field operative, Milja. I’m a trained mutt. Now there are some higher up who might listen to me. But they have to be persuaded that I have not been corrupted, after what I’ve done helping free those two, after…being healed by her, you understand. They have to believe that I haven’t fallen to the Enemy.”

  “I can vouch for you.”

  “Oh, that’s not going to cut it. Standards in the priesthood might be slack here and there, but believe me, in Vidimus they are exacting, because of who we have to deal with. Our order is dedicated to Saint Michael; he’s our patron and he’s going to be our first point of contact. I can’t be a priest with a mistress, Milja. I will have to make a full confession of everything I’ve done, and I’ll have to repent all my sins and be shriven.”

  “You can repent this?” My voice shook. “What we just did?”

  “I’ll have to reject all my sins, and all temptation. That means us.”

  I wanted to cry with pain. “How is this a sin?” I asked, covering his hand with my own, feeling his body and mine fitting together like they were made for one another. “How can you say that?”

  “Oh, Milja.” The weight of two thousand years of dogma and revelation were in those two miserable words. “You are going by feelings, and they’re no guide. Divine Law is given to us so we don’t have to rely on feelings.”

  “If love doesn’t matter, then nothing does.”

  He wrapped his arms around me and kissed my temple. “I am just telling you how it has to be, if we make that choice.”

  “You’d choose the Church over me.” I pushed his arms away and turned to look him in the face.

  “No.” He put his hands on my shoulders and took a deep breath. “I’m not making that choice. I’m asking you if you are prepared to give me up, to save Azazel.”

  His words, his terrible words, blew all mine away. We stood for a long moment, locked in stillness, locked in silence. “You can’t say that,” I managed at last. “You can’t say that to me. That is too cruel.”

  “It’s the reality we have to deal with. You need to see it.”

  I tore myself out of his grasp and marched around the room, my hand over my mouth, until I had the table between me and him. He didn’t follow; he didn’t even turn and look at me. He stayed exactly where he was, facing the sink and looking out of the window, his arms loose at his sides. Part of my brain wondered at how calm he looked, and how understatedly handsome in his loose shirt and his jeans, like someone’s husband just watching his kids play outside in the snow. Like someone I didn’t know at all.

  “There has to be some sort of alternative!”

  “Feel free to suggest anything that comes to mind.”

  “You said that you love me.” I was trying to sort all the pieces, but they were flying around inside my head, refusing to be captured.

  “I do.” His face, in profile and lit by the winter light, was expressionless. “I love you far more than I have any right to.”

  “Is this some sort of messed-up way of punishing me?”

  “For what?”

  “For loving Azazel too, like a slut? For screwing up your life? For leading you into sin?”

  Egan blinked. “No. Just… No.”

  “Then why are you trying to split us up, Egan?”

  “I’m not. I’m giving you the full picture. The choice.”

  You’re not; that is a lie. Do you even know that? You said Azazel’s name, which you never do sober, and that means he heard. Is the moral blackmail not enough? This is not a choice between two boyfriends, this is between you and the whole world. And you are forcing my hand. But you are forcing me to choose him.

  How can I do anything but to try and save Azazel? I love him. I will not let him go back into the darkness, not if I have any alternative.

  “I can’t abandon him,” I groaned. “I can’t! Please Egan, you’ve got to understand!”

  He looked over at me, and I saw the hurt in his eyes. But not raw hurt, the natural emotion of a man rejected by the woman he loves. An old, accepting hurt instead, like something familiar carried for years. One that bordered on grateful. “That’s the right choice,” he said. “In my opinion.”

  Oh Egan. Egan. It’s not me that you’re trying to punish, is it?

  It’s you.

  “I’ll go see to arrangements,” he said, walking away. Then in the doorway he paused. “Just a question, Milja.”

  “What?” I felt numb with shock.

  “How did you kick the door open last night, when you couldn’t even climb the steps? How did you get out of the lake?”

  I shiv
ered, as if I felt the ice all over again. Details in my memory were vague, however. “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  “Hm.” He grimaced. “I think I do.” He left the room without another word.

  I am in a place of dust.

  It lies all around, heaped into dunes taller than I am. When I move it scuffs up in clouds from my feet. If I had to breathe it I would choke, but I tell myself not to breathe. This is a dream, after all.

  The vault overhead is exactly the same dust-color as the dirt beneath my feet. In fact, I cannot tell if that dome is an ill-defined sky, or something more solid. There’s no sun.

  I’m naked.

  What is this place?

  I wonder if it is Sheol. Long before Christianity, the ancients believed in a waterless abode of the dead, neither Heaven nor Hell, where all went, good and evil alike. My own faith teaches that after death we go to Hades temporarily to await final judgment—but that is a place of comfort or terror, depending on how you stand with God. This desert seems to be neither.

  “Milja?” A voice behind me.

  I turn and there is a woman standing there. She has long dark hair, and looking into her pale face is like looking into a mirror.

  “Milja, do not trust him.” Her hand presses the curve of her belly. “See what he did to me.”

  “Go away!” I shout. “I don’t want to hear you!” And she dissolves into dust, blowing away.

  I plunge into the dunes, my feet sliding beneath me as I mount the heaps and then slither down the far side. Strange objects poke out of the dirt; the marble bust of a man with a rooster’s head; the head of a snake wearing a long wig, all carved out of wood; a bronze disk of many cogs.

  One of the long mounds is far bigger than the others, and I head toward that because there is no other landmark in this place. Then I realize it is not just another ridge of dust and I pause uneasily, discerning the crook of a vast leg, the curve of a shoulder. Slowly I work my way along, skirting its vast bulk, until the haze thins and I can look at it end-on.

  It is a sphinx, like the Great Sphinx of Giza. A couchant lion with the face of a bearded man, and a regal head-dress. But unlike that guardian of the pyramids with its wind-whittled, noseless visage, this face is whole still, and handsome, and distinctly sub-Saharan in cast. I stand between the huge paws and stare up at it towering over me.

  Grit falls in a hissing shower from the broad brow. Slowly the monster shakes its vast head, scattering the accumulated dust of centuries, revealing dark skin and slotted amber eyes. The dunes at its flanks pour away, and a broken wing that might easily blanket a football pitch shifts weakly.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Daughter of Earth, tell them to set me free!” he says, his voice so deep that I feel it as a seismic rumble through my bones. “Tell them!—Tell them that I will keep their secret!”

  I fall to my knees, my joints loosened by that thunderous roar.

  And I wake…

  …To the sound of bells.

  My room in the old ex-convent was more shabby than chic, the drab frescos at the angles of the doors and window peeling, and the high ceiling filled with shadows even though slats of light were creeping through the shutters. I woke to the sound of bells welcoming the dawn.

  At least that drowned out the loud tick of the old clock that had kept me awake for hours.

  Throwing off my thin blanket, I rose and padded across the marble floor to the window. The shutter latch was peculiarly complex, shifting rods in all sorts of unexpected directions, but it opened at last and I stepped out onto my balcony.

  The Tiber gleamed below me, sepia in the strange light. Though it wasn’t yet fully day, traffic purred and honked in the distance. Across the river a shadowy landscape of roofs and satellite dishes marched away to the great dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. Beyond that, heavy cumulonimbus clouds massed, their tops picked out by the first rays of the rising sun.

  As my eyes focused on the distance, something dark swirled and vanished from the shadows of a balustrade. A wisp of smoke, perhaps.

  “Azazel, I love you,” I whispered. I clenched my hands on the metal railing, feeling the air cool the sweat on my breastbone through my cotton tank top. My bare legs prickled, but this chill held none of the killing cold of North Dakota. The sun would be up very soon, and all of Rome would rejoice in its light.

  And I’d go face Vidimus.

  4

  WHEN IN ROME

  I like the cassock, by the way. Very cute.”

  “Milja…don’t start.” Egan did look good in that long black cassock and dog-collar as we strode swiftly along the Vatican corridor, though maybe that was because I was used to my father wearing something similar. He certainly had a much better figure for it than most of the pot-bellied clerics we’d passed that day, even if right at this moment he did appear somewhat self-conscious.

  “Hey, you made me wear a skirt.”

  “You know we’re not exactly going to be made welcome today. I thought we could at least try to look respectable. Through here.”

  He waved me through a door into a courtyard of shiny white marble, and the change of light made me blink, momentarily blinded. It was not so different from all the other palazzo courtyards we’d crossed since arriving in Vatican City, but the fountain caught my eye as Egan cut diagonally across the square. A Baroque Neptune flourished a trident, and at his feet sat four female sphinxes, facing outward. Instead of nipples they had stubby bronze tubes and I guessed that if the water had been running they would have spurted it from their breasts. I thought it ghastly.

  And the sphinxes made my memory itch.

  “There’s a Watcher here in Rome, isn’t there?”

  Egan stopped in his tracks. “What makes you say that?”

  “I saw him.” Then I had to admit, “In my dreams last night, I mean. He’s huge. It’s Samyaza, isn’t it?”

  He looked away. “I can’t discuss this.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I mean, it makes sense to keep your most important prisoner right there under your noses.” Samyaza, the Great Serpent, supreme leader of the Fallen Angels. The Snake of the Garden of Eden.

  “Milja, I mean it.” His face was taut. “I absolutely am not authorized to discuss that with you. Drop it, please. And do not bring it up in front of Father Giuseppe if you want to walk out of there a free woman.”

  “He promises to keep the secret if you’ll free him.”

  He spun on his heel and set off again, the skirts of his black robe billowing.

  “What secret?” I asked, scurrying in his wake, but of course he didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. He led me through an un-signposted door under a portico, and we found ourselves in a gargantuan hall that seemed to have been constructed for the benefit of a pointlessly outsized staircase that led up to the floors above—the shallow steps were more than twenty feet wide, and I couldn’t imagine why something so grand was needed. The architecture of the Holy City confused me—why the labyrinthine construction, where cramped corridors barely wide enough for two to pass opened onto areas of such pomp? Why had such awe-inspiring palaces accumulated so many graffiti tags? Why were there no walls or borders, if we were now within a separate nation-state? I’d lost all sense of direction as we crossed from building to building, and that—combined with the overwhelming scale of the place—was making me nervous.

  This was our third day in Rome; the authorities had not demonstrated any urgent desire to see us. While Egan sought an interview, I’d spent most of my time on group tours of the classical sites, safe among the pagan mythology from all mention of Heaven and Hell, trying to keep my mind busy and not brooding over the angels and men who troubled me so. In that quest I’d been only partially successful. It had given me a real turn when I’d seen, on the Arch of Titus, the winged figure of an angel in the eroded relief of the conqueror’s imperial chariot, as he processed in triumph with the looted treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem—but my guidebook had sworn to me that it
was simply a symbolic depiction of Victory.

  Nor did it help my mood that, because our appointment today was in the afternoon, Egan had offered to show me around the touristy bits of Vatican City first. That had been a big mistake. We’d drunk espresso standing up in a tiny café-bar and eaten square takeaway portions of pizza, but that had been the fun bit. We’d wandered St. Peter’s Square, where coach-loads of tourists milled and queued and got barked at by irritated security staff; and the Basilica, which seemed to me like a marble aircraft-hanger. We’d even tried to step into the Sistine Chapel, but the sight of that crowd of people crushed shoulder-to-shoulder, all gawping up at the painting ceiling with their mouths open while uniformed staff shouted at them to keep moving, had induced in me a spasm of claustrophobic panic and we’d backed out again down our private corridor.

  Claustrophobia and agoraphobia seemed to alternate in this place, with nothing in between. And everywhere we were surrounded by naked flesh—hugely muscled statues of ferocious-looking saints, frescoes where billowy people bumped around on clouds like pastel-colored helium balloons, and bare-bummed putti equally at home flashing pagan gods or the crucified Christ.

  To top off my anxiety, as I’d fought my way out of the crush surrounding Michelangelo’s Pieta, I was pretty sure I’d spotted the Archangel Raphael. He’d been attempting to blend into a crowd of South Korean tourists, but had failed by dint of being head and shoulders taller than anyone else, and supermodel-beautiful. He’d walked away and I’d lost sight of him. If it truly had been him.

  I hadn’t told Egan.

  Here, at the top of the vast stairwell and through another anonymous door into a broad gallery, we were surrounded by flesh again. Vast tapestries covered the rear walls, full of unclothed Greek heroes slaughtering one other. Before these stood twin rows of white marble statues. I couldn’t tell if they were Roman originals or Renaissance homages, but almost all of them were nudes. I scrunched my face in bewilderment.