by Marie Browne
Belial snorted. ‘I didn’t think you’d recognised me, Galgaliel.’
The man just smiled and ignored us both.
As the humming increased, small items – bottles, jars and other more unidentifiable things – began to vibrate on the shelves at the back of the room. The dust on the floor rose in little puffs then sank back down as the humming rose and fell in both volume and pitch.
Belial winced and headed for the door. ‘Come with me if you want to be able to think in ten minutes’ time or stick your fingers in your ears,’ he shouted as he made to leave.
I was tired; the chair was soft and I really couldn’t be bothered to move. I nodded and waved as he headed out the shop.
‘OK.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
It was an uncomfortable ten minutes or so. By the time Galgaliel had dropped his humming back down to a calm vibration, my jaw ached from clenching my teeth and my eyeballs felt as though they’d been taken out, washed in bleach and put back in the wrong way round. I had a headache which also rose and fell in tone every time I moved and my skin felt as though it had been rubbed down with sandpaper. Even my hair hurt.
‘There we go.’ Galgaliel nodded with satisfaction and turned to me with a grin. ‘Belial bottled it, did he?’
I nodded carefully.
‘Headache?’ he asked.
Unwilling to nod again I gave him a single thumbs up and kept my eyes closed against the thousands of scintillating scotomas that danced like fireflies at the edges of my vision.
I felt him take my hand and press a rough fired clay cup into my palm.
‘Drink that, it’ll sort you out. It will also give you back some of the energy you spent doing that healing on your friend here.’ He lifted the edge of Keril’s tunic and had a look at the long white scar that now graced the demon’s back. ‘Quite a nice job.’ He sounded genuine. ‘I bet you feel like shit.’
Careful not to move too fast I gave him a single small nod – then, trying to control my shaking hand, brought the cup to my lips and drank. The thick liquid tasted of aniseed, lavender and had an alcoholic kick to it. A couple of ice cubes, a packet of cheese and onion crisps and a pickled egg or two and me and a bottle of this could easily spend a happy evening together.
Within less than a minute the headache and whirling lights had disappeared only to be replaced with a general euphoria and an unexplained urge to laugh, run and spin. I giggled as Belial stuck his head through the door; his face seemed to be covered in little blue flowers with bells at their centres. I could hear each one ringing independently but they all had a different note and, together, they played Au Clair de la Lune as he walked. While laughing at the flowers I noticed that the room had begun to fade.
I’m in a dirty flat. I wander from room to room, spiders cluster in the corners and cockroaches scuttle over my bare toes. There are other people in the room; I should recognise them but I don’t. I walk into the bathroom. Conjoined twins sit smiling in the bath. They are trying to entrap and distract me and smile as they eat handfuls of dried cannabis. Their teeth are sharp.
‘How much did you give him?’ Belial bent down to take a closer look at me then pulled his head away quickly as I tried to grab his lower lip.
‘Possibly a little too much.’ Galgaliel didn’t bother turning round from his study of his patient. ‘If he tries to walk up the walls restrain him, would you?’ He carefully placed a crystal into a bowl of water. Humming a gentle tune under his breath he busied himself cleaning away all the blood from around Keril’s tiny pale scales on his abdomen. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘He’ll snap out of it soon.’
I’m standing on a bridge. Three homeless men and a woman are spitting over the sides into the river below. It’s a competition. From each laughing mouth comes a never-ending string of saliva – it flares as it hits the water, four glowing strings that divide the water into lanes. Bakeneko tugs at my hand and, dragging me from the edge of the bridge, hands me a PVC cat mask. I shake my head – I don’t want to wear it, but he keeps pushing it toward me …
‘How are you able to be here, Galgaliel?’ Belial dragged up a plain wooden chair and, turning it around, sat astride with his arms folded across the back.
The tall man shrugged. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’ Galgaliel stared at his hands. ‘I chose to fall. I am now one of the Fallen. My name will forever be spat upon by the Host and I’m forced to cure the descendants of murderers and cutthroats to enable me to live.’ He paused. ‘But life is still better than with the Host. What is it the humans say? “Same shit, different day.” What’s the difference?’ He hummed a little louder and the crystal on Keril’s navel lit up for a brief moment.
‘Could you not?’ Belial pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘That humming of yours brings on monumental headaches, you know.’
Metatron’s office is now a gym. I step through the window, as flames lick the sky above the dark city. I need to get home. I’m on a train, people are running from the fire; it pushes them ahead of its boundaries – a flaming sheepdog easily guiding its woolly-headed charges.
‘The question really is, what are you doing back here?’ Galgaliel leant on the cot and, folding his arms, he stared at Belial.
Belial said nothing.
‘Let’s ask your spaced-out little friend then, shall we?’ Galgaliel said.
I’m back in the flat and trying to pack. I need to leave with everyone else. My clothes are scattered, ripped into tatters and rags by the twins’ sharp teeth. They have eaten all the cannabis and are now drinking long pink cocktails. They pick up crumbs and force them between my teeth. I’m so stoned I can’t pack, I can’t get away. I look out of the window and laugh at the flames. I’m going to die in the fire.
Belial yawned and put his head in his hand. ‘Well, I don’t think you’re going to get anything sensible out of him at the moment.’
The tall healer shrugged, then pushed himself away from the bed and squatted down in front of me. His eyes whirled in a mixture of amber, silver and gold; his smile stretched literally from ear to ear. He looked like the Cheshire cat. ‘I didn’t catch your name, my friend?’ His smile detached itself from his face for a moment and swung sideways before settling back between his cheeks.
Oh! With his voice the dream flowed away. For a moment I was sad. I’d had an opportunity to escape but the fire had frightened me. I tried to concentrate on the man smiling at me and bullied myself to remember the question. He meant me – he wanted to know my name. Well, that was OK, I could tell him my name. A dark mass pressed down upon me and stopped my mouth. I couldn’t think. Which name? Which name should I give him?
‘His name’s Joe.’ Belial frowned over at us. ‘Good grief, how long is he going to stay in that state?’
‘Joe,’ I said. ‘Just Joe, that’s all I’ve always been, just Joe. No one else in here, just me, just Joe.’ Good God, I was funny, the sounds of “just Joe” fell off my tongue like licking syrup and I laughed and tried to catch some more. ‘Just Joe, just Joe. Joey, that’s me. Always wanted to be just Joe, never anything else, just Joe.’ I felt suddenly sad. ‘Never really him though, always tried to be Joe, but that’s not me, is it?’ I looked over at Belial. I didn’t want to talk about names any more. Names were stupid, like labels. They made people treat you in a certain way – made them judge, made them angry. When you looked in a mirror you didn’t see a name, you saw the person. What’s in a name anyway?
‘Joe!’ Belial reached for my jacket and gave me a little shake. ‘Do try and focus.’
Galgaliel pushed his hand away and smiled at me again. ‘You’re right, Joe, names aren’t important.’ He turned to look at Belial. ‘Look at Belial – he wasn’t always someone that shirked his responsibilities; he wasn’t always the person that left an entire group of people to die of starvation and cold. Once he was the best of angels. Once he could be trusted.’
Belial’s face twisted in fury and he leapt to his feet. His huge charcoa
l wings were held high above his head. Picking up his chair he threw it into the wall where it smashed, not only itself but a shelf of glassware. I watched as the deadly shards slowed, glistening and twisting like mirrors in water. I closed my eyes as they fell with infinite grace to the floor, bouncing and tinkling in a rain of deadly bells.
‘My responsibilities?’ Belial screamed. ‘Why were they my responsibilities? They were Lucifer’s responsibilities but he disappeared and I ended up in charge – it was a farce. There were people here that shouldn’t have been. They’d done nothing wrong, so I let them go and waited for my punishment.’ He shook his head as his wings drooped. ‘I would have welcomed punishment – it would have shown that my father cared even that much for me, for the things I did, but none came.’
Galgaliel reached over a gentle thumb and, lifting one of my eyelids, frowned before turning back to the depressed fallen angel. ‘You did the right thing, letting them go, but what about the ones you left behind?’
Belial looked up at him and shrugged.
Galgaliel’s elegant, bronze-tipped cream wings snapped open as he clenched his fists by his thighs. He closed his eyes then spoke through gritted teeth. ‘You condemned hundreds of people to live in a world with no escape, no water, no working government, no food, no structure and no hope.’ Galgaliel towered over Belial who refused to look him in the eye. ‘You condemned every one you left behind to a slow, lingering death. You walked away to make your new utopia and you left them to die.’ The healer howled at Belial, ‘How could you do that?’ He ran a hand through his coloured hair. ‘It’s like a boy that doesn’t understand the needs of an unwanted pet. So he puts it in a box and forgets about it.’
‘They deserved it. They were all walking horrors.’ Belial refused to look up from the floor.
‘True, they were …’ The healer scowled and thrust his face toward the wincing fallen angel. ‘But even walking horrors have children, you know. I hope you wake up in the dark and think about those you left behind.’ He clutched Belial by the shoulders and shook him, his serene face contorted with rage. ‘Do you? Did you?’ He shouted. ‘Did you think about their children at all while you were building your new city? While you were walking in the sun, while you were buying sweets from your pretty stalls, while you were creating libraries and knowledge and spouting that crap about opportunities and working together.’ Galgaliel paused to breathe for a moment. ‘Did all that shit get overshadowed by the killing, the cannibalism, the despair, the plagues, the dirt and the madness that you left behind – that you so conveniently forgot about. Did it? Well, did it?’ He pushed Belial back into the chair and walked over to his workbench where he poured a glass of orange liquid which he carried over to me.
I stared at him. His switches of mood frightened me.
‘Come on, Joe,’ he coaxed. ‘Drink this and everything will be back to normal.’
I looked down at the drink. His long fingers were covering mine and he was gently guiding the glass toward my mouth. ‘I promise it will be all right.’ He smiled. I believed him and drank.
‘I didn’t know what to do.’ Belial’s voice, very quiet and slow, drifted toward us. ‘Lucifer had gone, the demons were getting ready to leave, the damned were …’
He broke off for a moment; obviously he hadn’t looked back for a number of years.
‘God had created Earth, he’d brought in all the humans to populate his little tin town, but they weren’t grateful enough, they didn’t obey like the angels. They argued and challenged, created things of their own and strived to be more than they were. He didn’t want that so he sent his angels down to tell them to behave. It didn’t work. A lot of us liked the humans – they laughed and worked and sang. They were irreverent and funny, so some of us got more involved than we should and the Nephilim were born.
‘God was so angry that he wiped everything from the face of his play planet with one big storm – washed it up, if you like, and cleaned it out to start again. If I’d been bitter about it I would have accused him of having a tantrum like a spoilt child, but obviously that could never have been true. A group of humans were sent here to be punished and “corrected”, but they were just doing what humans do best. It’s not in their nature to obey mindlessly – it’s almost impossible for them to have faith when they’re so busy asking “why?”
‘Lucifer was angrier than I’d ever seen him. His children had all been wiped out, the woman he loved, everything he’d enjoyed. All he knew ended up being swept away to make space for another “great plan”. He spoke to us all – convinced us that we should complain, say something, do something; just for once we should take a stand.’ He broke off and sat down again.
Galgaliel nodded. ‘I know.’ He raised his eyebrows at me, checking if I was OK. I just nodded – I didn’t want to break Belial’s concentration. This time I was just going to go with the headache. The room was back in focus and the bell-ringing flowers had all disappeared. It was blissful, I was even enjoying the pain.
‘So here we all ended up – out of God’s way, and out of his hair.’ Belial took a deep breath. ‘Most of the angels couldn’t take it and just turned themselves off hoping that one day God would forgive them. Lucifer hung around for a while hating everything and then disappeared, which left me as the only archangel in charge. We tried to do what He wanted, but it was so hard. The humans that had been dumped here with us didn’t deserve what was being done to them, so I let them go. But there were some I couldn’t let out: they were so set on revenge – revenge on God, revenge on those that hadn’t been put here. I was torn – torn between just letting go. I envied those of us that had chosen the path of sleep and I suppose …’ he hesitated. ‘I suppose I was still trying to do as I was told.’ He looked up at Galgaliel, his face pale and his eyes wet. ‘In answer to your question, the answer is yes. Every night I wake up and wonder what I left behind. It’s like indigestion – a pain in your chest – and the guilt weighs everything down. I’m sorry, but I just didn’t know what to do. And now Metatron has decided that he could do a better job.’
Galgaliel snorted. ‘Now, there’s a surprise.’
‘He wants to drag Lucifer out of hiding, and remove him from the grand scheme of things, giving his power to his right-hand man.’ Belial nodded over at me. ‘He’ll then take God’s power and, with Joe under his thumb, he’ll have it all, but we stopped him. We took Lucifer’s hiding place and brought it here. I thought if we could get Lucifer to his Throne Room we could separate him from his vessel and that would also bring God back because both of those are better than what Metatron is suggesting, which is the utter annihilation of all worlds, all creatures. Blank slate, start again, and this time humans will be created “properly” – no more questions, no more discoveries: they’ll be created to serve!’
Galgaliel dropped the glass he was holding. ‘Lucifer’s here?’ He gasped. ‘And obviously you’re here.’ He looked over at me. ‘How many others are there?’
Belial shrugged. ‘Lucifer, me, Joe, my daughter and a couple of others.’
‘Great, just great.’ Galgaliel laughed. ‘And let me guess, they all have abilities– they’re all “old blood”?’ The tall healer dropped into a chair and put his head in his hands. ‘What state is Lucifer in now?’
Belial grimaced. ‘At the moment he’s in human form – a podgy insurance salesman from the soft south.’
Galgaliel groaned. ‘Wouldn’t be much good in a scrap then.’
‘Couldn’t poke his way out of a wet paper bag without dropping it and tripping over it,’ I piped up. ‘What’s all this about – why does it matter who we have with us?’
Silence fell for a couple of moments then Galgaliel gave an irritated moan. I couldn’t make out the words he used but it sounded like ‘Oh bloody hell.’
Shaking himself he got up and began pacing around his surgery. ‘OK, the people left here didn’t do well in the beginning. Eventually, things became more organised. A crude human council took charge an
d they worked out that food could be grown over the river, so those with the urge to make a place for themselves went over there and they traded back and forth. Councils changed, governments rose and fell, people had kids and, for about a thousand years, it all worked quite well.’
He paused for a moment. ‘But it wasn’t enough. As more discoveries were made, this current council took power and decided that they needed more interaction with the outside world. So they worked hard with the materials they had and found a way to open a door.’
Belial frowned and looked up. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘It would take immense power to open a doorway right through the layers.’
Galgaliel nodded. ‘Immense,’ he agreed. ‘This whole world is built on a crystal framework, and the council discovered that certain crystals can hold energy like big batteries – and not only hold it, but increase it. You have to get out of here.’ Galgaliel went to check on Keril. ‘Although I think this one will have to stay with me.’
‘We can’t – one of our people has gone missing,’ Belial said
The healer looked worried.
‘Galgaliel, there’s something you aren’t telling me,’ Belial snapped. ‘What’s going on?’
Galgaliel started stuffing odd items into a large rough woven bag. ‘Does anyone else know you’re here?’ He didn’t bother to look at us – just kept stuffing things in the bag.
‘No,’ Belial said.
‘Yes.’ I cut across him.
Both Belial and Galgaliel turned to look at me.
I tried to push my headache away. ‘Do you remember that little hunter bloke?’ I said. ‘He turned round when Lucifer called your name?’
Galgaliel pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. ‘This little hunter, did one of his mates wear a big watch?’
We both nodded and the healer groaned. ‘That’s Andre. He will have gone straight to the council and you can guarantee your missing friend didn’t just disappear by chance. You’ve already been attacked once.’ He waved a hand at Keril. ‘It won’t be long before they’ll be back to try again.’