Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “It did. We lost.”

  “Yeah I read about it. Why’d you and Lucifer rebel?”

  “Lucifer had his own reasons. He was my friend, but I did not share his motivations.”

  “But you joined him.”

  “Doesn’t every man who goes to war do so for his own reason?”

  “Fair enough. If I see Lucifer I’ll ask him his. But what was yours?”

  Sam looked at the moon again, then down at Twiggs. He sat down on the stone opposite him, and rested a hand on the pommel of his silver sword.

  A good sign.

  “A woman,” Sam said.

  “You mean a mortal woman?”

  Sam nodded.

  “I heard tales of that too. Never figured ‘em for true. So who was this woman?”

  “The first woman.”

  “You mean Eve?”

  “Eve was not the first woman. God crafted Eve from Adam’s body to correct the mistake He made with Lilith.”

  “Lilith?”

  “Lilith was the first woman. She was made from the earth as Adam was. She was his equal.”

  “Now that I hadn’t heard. What was she like?”

  For the first time, Sam permitted a thin smile to slide across the side of his mouth.

  “Spirited. She pulsed with life. Her body, her skin, flushed with it. She had red hair, like seraphic fire. Seeing her, I know now I ached to hold her. But I did not even know what the feeling meant as I looked upon her. The creation of man and woman was not a popular decision among the ministers of heaven. To many, encasing a pure spirit within a mortal shell that was bound to expire was a perversion. To others, the commandment that we angels serve these half-formed children was outrageous.”

  “What about to you?”

  “When I looked on Lilith, I saw the soft light that shined within her as if through a cloud. It was so precious and innocent. Long had I lived among spirits, and I was used to the glory of the naked soul. Seeing it obscured in flesh and blood was exotic to me. I was old, and she was new.”

  “But why rebel?”

  “Lucifer made promises to all the rebel factions, as all politicians necessarily must, to form a cause.”

  “He promised you Lilith.”

  “Do you think me a fool?” Sam asked, and there was no threat in his tone. It was an honest question, backed by misery. It deserved a direct answer.

  “Yeah, I guess you were. But there’ve been bigger fools since.”

  “You speak plain, Mr. Twiggs. I appreciate that. Most mortals would lie to me in the hope of prolonging their existence.”

  “I told you, it’s Barry. And I have no illusions,” Twiggs said. “What about Lilith? Did you two ever meet?”

  “Indeed we did,” Sam said. “After the Rebellion failed, we Fallen were cast into hell. Lucifer built his capitol, his throne, and many of the Fallen remained his servants. I wanted nothing further to do with that, so I wandered. I lingered at the edge of Eden, the Garden where Adam and Lilith were. I watched, and loved from the shadow of the East.”

  “So what happened to Lilith? How did Eve come about?”

  “I became a fixture at the outskirts of the Garden, and it wasn’t long before they noticed me. The man, Adam, would take Lilith by the hair and tell her I was not fit to look upon. Michael and the other angels had warned him about the Fallen. At first, she was obedient. But sometimes I would catch her alone, watching me. When Adam took her away, she would look back until she was out of sight.”

  Twiggs detected a hint of vehemence every time Sam mentioned the progenitor’s name. He didn’t take offense.

  “I take it you weren’t an admirer of Adam.”

  “That fumbling ape,” Sam said, a terrible anger flashing across his face. “Naming the beasts and birds as if they were his, dragging them down with his labels. And then....”

  “What?”

  “Lilith would go away from him. She would come to a far corner of the Garden, and we would speak.”

  “About what?”

  “About the secrets of the universe, about God and the angels. She was like a child, hungry for anything I would teach her. She could learn nothing from the man. One day, he caught us speaking. He raged at her, till all his pitiful blood was in his face. He threw her down, tried to mount her like a dog, as he always did. She fought back. She would not submit to him. She raised such a clamor that the angels came to see what was the matter, and God too.

  “I stood helpless at the boundary of the Garden as Adam accused her and demanded of his Creator a more facile mate. Demanded! As though he were owed. God questioned Lilith, and her only answer was to run. She ran from the Garden, into my arms. Out of that lush prison, I swept her into the air. We flew across the world, embracing again and again in a passion that made the world quake.”

  “Pardon me,” Twiggs interrupted. “But when you say you embraced, what you mean to say is, you....ah....copulated?”

  Sam blinked.

  “What did you think I meant?”

  “But....how is that possible?”

  “It would be hard for you to understand,” Sam said. “Angels could never mimic mortal bodies because being spirit, we never had any experience with mortal flesh. It was forbidden. The moment she embraced me however, I knew her and she knew me. We found a middle ground, so to speak, and so.....”

  “Yeah, that’s not what I meant either. Uh....how do I put this? Even in this middle ground, were you uh....equipped to....?”

  He gestured to Sam’s lap, hoping his throat clearing would be enough to get the point across.

  Sam cocked his head, then seemed to follow his thought.

  “You are getting ahead of the story.”

  “Sorry. I hope I didn’t offend you.”

  “No. Where was I?”

  “Copulating over Creation.”

  “Ah yes. The fruit of our passion seeded the earth with demons.”

  “Demons?”

  “Yes. There were no demons before then. Only fallen angels. The offspring of Lilith and I were the first. The first four were daughters. We named them all. Lilit, Agrat, Nehema, and Eisheth. They were born almost simultaneously, at great pain to Lilith. More, they were hideous.”

  “Never heard a father refer to his offspring like that before.”

  “They were,” Sam reiterated. “Bestial. As demons they could control their aspect, but as infants they did not know how. Lilith was terrified by them. She thought them monsters, a curse from God. She ran from me.”

  “Left you with them?”

  “Yes. These were new beings. I didn’t even understand them. They matured almost overnight. They came to me, each of them, in the guise of my Lilith.”

  He paused, and fixed Twiggs with a meaningful glance.

  “For four nights I thought she returned to me.”

  “I see where you’re going here,” Twiggs said soberly, reminded of the sin of Lot and his daughters. “How’d you find out it wasn’t her?”

  “God sent Michael the archangel to me and he revealed their treachery out in the wastes. My daughters fled, and Michael told me that Lilith and our offspring were filling the world with demons, and it couldn’t be allowed to continue. I tried to fight him, but the Lord was with him. He cut me, as you see me, so I couldn’t father anymore bastards. Then I was bound over to be sentenced.”

  “To become the Angel of Death?”

  “Yes,” said Sam.

  “Did you ever see Lilith again?”

  “Once. We were tried together you see, with God our judge and the archangels our jury. In the time we had been away, Adam and Eve had been ousted from the Garden, thanks to Lucifer. Adam blamed Eve as usual, and wandered away from her. He found Lilith in the land of Nod, and for a time they were together.” He chuckled. “I suppose she saw the light again though, and left him. But I had taught her strange arts, and she begat demons on him too. Our coupling had made her something more than human. She was caught fleeing across the ocean, and bargained for
her life. She allowed a hundred of her children to die every day, but retained the powers she had been given. She was made immortal, and I became psychopomp to the dying.”

  “So you can never meet again,” Twiggs said.

  “I remember the last time I saw her, before they sealed me in this prison, closed me off from Creation. She was clothed in animal skins. I had never seen such a thing. It brought me back to the first time I saw her. She was a fierce, golden spirit twice-wrapped in death. So strong. So willful. She would have stared God in the face if it wouldn’t have burned her to nothingness. But she didn’t even look at Michael as he passed sentence. She looked at me. And there were tears running from her eyes. The blood of the human soul, I always thought of them as.”

  They were quiet for a long time, Death and Twiggs. Death’s thoughts were inscrutable, but Twiggs thought on Junia and the last time he’d seen her. It was the last time he would ever see her.

  “For the first few thousand years,” Sam said, “I punished you mortals. I tore you from this earth and shook you like babes wakened in the night by enemy soldiers. I flung you into hell wailing. I laughed to see you scream. I spent my rage on your souls. I imagined new impotent perversities to inflict upon every soul I was called to claim, and each one I think plummeted into hell a little less sane than the last. I think I was insane myself. You infected me. I have danced with the dying, swung them round and round to music only I could hear only to cast them into the inferno on the last go round. I emptied my heart in hatred of you, until I was like a great scar. My own sadism bored me after that, and I spoke little at all. For all the crimes I committed, it was useless. No soul came to me dreading what I had done. Each one feared only the change I represented. It was exhausting, starting over each time. Once I sat silently on the soul of a man for eight years, just to watch him gibber beneath me like an animal.”

  “Well,” said Twiggs, “I’m glad you’re past that period, anyway.”

  Sam ignored him.

  “In time, I do not know how long, I became curious of humanity again. I asked every soul about the world. I learned of man’s wars, of the plagues that brought him to me in scores, of the progress and failures of his civilization. But soon that fanned the hatred in me again, because I could not see these things for myself. I asked about Lilith now and again, heard rumors, but no one knew of her. Sometimes, I forced the souls of young women to mimic her. It was never the same.”

  “Do you still hate us?”

  “Not anymore,” said Sam. “Learned men came to me, and begged me to let them stay. They wanted to see their works bear fruit. Great thinkers asked to remain by my side and see where humanity went. Artists, poets, leaders. But this could never be. Only one soul at a time, and so I threw them out with the rest. It was all such a waste. Then I began to pity you your mortality.”

  “Do you still?”

  “Now I envy it. I come for you. But as long as men are born, no one will ever come for me, Mr. Twiggs. You live your lives and pass into something else. I go on and on. There is no change.”

  Twiggs sat quietly, ashamed at his earlier thoughts of betrayal. Could he do nothing to help this poor creature?

  “Sam, what if I took your sword there and....?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “It won’t cut me.” Then, after a moment, he put his hand over Twiggs’s and smiled. “But thank you.”

  Twiggs shuddered. Death’s touch was colder than the bottom of the river where he’d expired.

  Sam rose and stretched his long limbs. The moon was gone from the sky now, and above them was total dark. The east was purpling, and a deep blue was spreading over the rim of the earth. Somewhere a bird sang in anticipation.

  “I guess that’s all there is to tell,” Sam said. “You have your story now.”

  “It’s a helluva story,” Twiggs said. “Hope to tell it to someone else someday.” He looked at Sam. Sam’s expression was flat, and Twiggs realized he’d been fishing. He thought he had him then.

  “If you don’t know what happens to me, how do you know about hell?”

  “I was told to tell you. It’s my only other duty. If it was a lie, I wouldn’t even know.”

  “God is a vindictive sonofabitch, isn’t he?” said Twiggs.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think He’s forgotten about me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I wish I knew that were so.”

  “What happens now?” Twiggs asked, fighting down that trembling again.

  “Put your hand by the crown of your head. Up near the back,” Sam suggested.

  Twiggs did. There was something there. It felt like a strand of cobwebs between his fingers, but it was attached to his skull. No, that wasn’t right. It was a part of him, coming out of his head. Touching it made him swoon a bit. The world seemed to jar and bend around him, as if everything hung from that tether.

  “What is it?” he whispered, afraid.

  “It binds you to this world. Only my sword can cut it.” He took the sword out of the earth. Though it had spent the evening with its nose in the mud, nothing clung to it. The blade was clean and pure.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Twiggs wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. He tried to stand up, failed, and stood again.

  “When you’re ready,” said Sam.

  Twiggs looked at the water beneath which his corpse lay. He looked all around, taking in the dark desert, wishing he could see more, wishing the sun would hurry up and come already. A little tecolote swooped into its little roost in a hole in a saguaro after the night’s hunt. He wanted to take it all in, take it with him, but dawn was a long way off yet. He found the sight he lingered on most was somewhere behind his eyes.

  “Can I tell you why I didn’t hunt me up a shootist and make a name for myself in the dime novels, Sam?”

  “It can’t take long, Mr. Twiggs,” said Sam, not unkindly, but firmly. “There are always others waiting.”

  “Barry. It was a woman too. Probably from the same stock as Lilith, I’d bet. Her name was Junia. We loved each other from the get go. But her pa was a powerful man. He wouldn’t let us be. Took her away. Sent her abroad. Fixed her up with some rich swell. He wouldn’t have me for a son-in-law, so I made myself his enemy. Went after him with everything I had. Dug up every murderous deed, every underhanded thing he’d ever done and put it up for everybody to see. Made it my life, digging in the dirt. Look were it got me. The whims of fortune. The lack of a woman. They drive us down strange roads, don’t they, Sam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will I remember her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then Twiggs felt a buildup deep inside him, something he’d been holding back. He wasn’t the sort to panic, but here he was, sitting by a dark river, and it would be the last sight he ever saw in this world. It should’ve been a waterfall, or a sunny meadow, or children playing. His own children. Junia ought to be here, holding his hand, a wrinkled old liver-spotted hand with a band of gold on the finger. God, did he have to die alone? He thought about how he had played with his life in the past, flaunted it, put so many things off. Now he wanted it back. He wanted it all back. And it was drifting away quicker than the water over his bones.

  “What is this? A goddamned game? Why was I ever born? Why do I have to die? What’s next?” he spluttered, losing his composure in the last, and spluttering.

  He put his face in his hands, and the Angel of Death waited patiently by.

  “I broke my promise. I’m sorry,” he said after a minute.

  “No matter.”

  “Well,” sighed Twiggs, hugging himself, gripping his upper arms, though it was all an illusion. “I’m sorry for your troubles. And I do thank you for the exclusive.”

  “Thank you for listening, Barry.”

  It was good to hear his own name.

  “Go on and do it.”

  Sam raised the sword. His face was placid. He was trying to show em
pathy, and perhaps he did feel it, but it was a bootless, comical gesture, a thing with no hope trying to give hope to one who had lost it.

  In the moment the sword tilted back, Twiggs saw great black wings over Sam’s shoulders like a crow’s. There had been crows like that around the farm in Shreveport when he was a boy. They would perch on the fence posts and chase the sparrows through the willow trees. He would pitch rocks up at those crows, feeling for the little birds. Sometimes he would hit them, most often not. Once he killed one dead.

  He closed his eyes.

  The sword cut the air and parted the ethereal chord, and Twiggs came apart like a pile of leaves in the wind. The pieces swirled on the etheric breeze and went off into the dark.

  Sam lay the sword across his shoulder and walked on down the river.

  This story started with the Bell Club, an anthology concept developed by Paul Mannering, the author of Tank Bread, about a Victorian era club whose membership required the pledge to relate a strange story of personal horror to the rest of the group. Nobody read that thing, which is a shame, because it was a great idea.

  I wanted to do a weird Great White Hunter story, and was at the time, reading of the scandals of the so-called Happy Valley Set, a group of English, Irish, and American aristocrats living a wild lifestyle of free sex and drugs far from the prying eyes of their respectable peers in the 1920’s. The various scandals of Kiki Preston, Idrina Sackville, and Josslyn Hay have filled books and movies. There’s a great deal more about them, including pictures, on my bog site at - https://emerdelac.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/great-white-horror-in-tales-from-the-bell-club/

  My friend Jeff Carter pointed me to the nursery rhyme of The King of Cats, which tied the whole thing together for me.

  Tell Tom Tildrum

  “Were the squabs to your liking, Captain Howe?” Bertrand asked, dabbing the grease from his lips with his napkin.

  In truth, they had not been. I have never much appreciated the philosophy behind pigeons à la crapaudine; squabs masquerading as frogs. It’s a silly French concoction, a holdover from the old days when papists insisted that their fish be made to look like beef to ease the Lenten fasts. I’d had it once before, the first time I’d dined with the Prestons at Mundui on Lake Navaisha. A preposterous dish. I like my swine arse up and my pigeons on their backs. I’d said so before. That was why Kiki had taken such a liking to me. The American infatuation with plain speaking, I suppose.