The Day the Angels Fell

by Shawn Smucker

  “You see the note?” my father asked, his voice from the next room mingled with called strikes and balls.

  “Yeah,” I said, holding it in my hands, trying not to let fear fill me up and knock me over.

  “Well, make sure you’re around tomorrow. He seemed pretty intent on seeing you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

  I had another dream that night.

  I’m playing hide-and-seek with my dad in the farmhouse. I’m very small, maybe four or five years old. I hear him counting in the kitchen.

  “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .”

  He keeps counting as I climb the steps. I stop for a moment in the hall and look at each of the doors: the bathroom door at the end of the hall, the door to my parents’ room right there beside it, my door in the middle, the empty guest room to the right. It’s not day and it’s not night. Dusk maybe. A whisper of light drifts in the windows and under the doors.

  “Twenty-three . . . twenty-four . . . twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . .”

  He keeps counting, and I can’t decide which room to go into. I get scared. This is when I usually run to my mother, but suddenly I’m twelve again, no longer four or five, and I remember that my mother is dead. I don’t have anyone to run to, and my dad is about to come looking for me. I don’t like the feeling of not having a safe place, a safe person.

  “Thirty-eight . . . thirty-nine . . . forty . . .”

  I run into the spare bedroom and look out the window. The streetlight on the corner of the church building winks on and off. Then back on again. I look to the right, and the tree blows in the wind. It’s getting dark, and lightning strikes over the eastern mountain.

  “Forty-eight . . . forty-nine . . . fifty. Ready or not, here I come!”

  Silence.

  I wait. I picture my father searching the main level of the house. I can hear him calling out.

  “Sam, are you in there? Sam, are you in here?”

  I hear his feet climbing the steps, one slow step at a time. I look around the room for someplace to hide, but there’s no furniture in there, not in my dream, so I stand by the door. I decide I’ll have to let him find me, but then something strange happens.

  “Sam, where are you?” the voice calls out.

  But it’s not my dad’s voice anymore.

  It’s Mr. Jinn’s.

  I dash over to the attic door and pull it open. It doesn’t make a sound and I wonder about that. I run up the stairs and hide among the boxes. I hear his voice again, and he’s in the spare room.

  “Sam, where are you?” he asks in a singsong kind of voice, and I know for sure that it’s Mr. Jinn. “I’m here to give you what I owe you.”

  I tuck myself away in the back and hear thunder outside the attic. I hear his footsteps coming up the attic stairs.

  Then, in the way dreams can change, I’m out in the lightning tree, way up high in the branches, and I’m reaching for a piece of fruit. I look down, and Mr. Jinn is climbing up the tree. He reaches up and grabs my foot, and I don’t know how he managed to climb so high. He’s so big and the branches are so small, and where his hand touches my heel I feel his nails claw a deep cut into my skin.

  “That fruit doesn’t belong to you,” he says, and he turns into the Amarok. Then both of us are falling, falling, falling through the branches, the bright green grass rushes up at me, and as I make contact with the ground, I wake up.

  “Finish feeding the lamb and come in for lunch,” my dad shouted down from the upper level of the barn. I was down on the ground floor, sweeping the walkways. I heard him and Mr. Tennin walk out the back of the barn, where the second level was even with the hill. The massive barn door slid closed behind them, the sound of it grating and far away. It became very quiet.

  I walked to the corner and leaned the broad broom against the wooden wall. My sweeping had stirred up dust, so the air was full of particles floating through the rays of light like a million planets. I stopped by the lamb’s stall and picked up the fresh bottle full of milk. The lamb jumped over to the bars and bleated in a pleading voice. I smiled at it and patted it on the head. It tried to suck on my fingers, thinking everything was a bottle of some kind.

  I leaned against the bars and fed the lamb. Its short tail wagged back and forth, and it jerked its head to move the milk out of the bottle. I thought about my mother and it made me want to cry again, and I got mad at myself for always wanting to cry. But still I thought about her. I remembered our last day together, how she brought me home from practice, how she stopped to let me pick up the cat, how she climbed up in the tree during the storm to save me.

  The more I thought about her, the greater the ache. The more I thought about her, the more I found myself visiting old ground—I needed that Tree of Life.

  Another thought lodged itself in my mind. I reviewed the previous days, and I knew who had the Tree.

  Abra.

  It had to be Abra.

  Who else had access to it? Who else knew it was there? Only her.

  That old familiar darkness simmered inside me, and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. Of course she had it! She must have realized what it was before I came back, picked the lock or used a spare key, and taken it. She either hid it or destroyed it.

  Destroyed it.

  The lamb wasn’t quite finished, but in my disgust I yanked the bottle away and put it up on the shelf. Turning, I saw Mr. Jinn behind me, surrounded by the swirling particles of dust drifting through the sunlight. And standing beside him, leaning into the shadows and almost too big to fit into the barn, was the Amarok.

  I saw a flash of movement at the opposite corner of the barn and glanced over in time to see Icarus slip through the bars and flee into the shadows.

  I looked back at Mr. Jinn and the Amarok, but I wasn’t scared. Why wasn’t I scared? I didn’t know, but I didn’t care.

  “She took the Tree,” I said. “She hid it somewhere.”

  Mr. Jinn nodded slowly. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

  “She’ll be here soon. Should we ask her about it?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “No. Not yet. Let’s leave it. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that.”

  He looked over at the Amarok. It hadn’t taken its eyes off me, as if it still waited for Mr. Jinn to give it the order to attack. It took a step in my direction, saliva hanging from its lower row of snarling teeth.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Mr. Tennin is going to help me find the other three things. Help us find the other three things.”

  “Is that right?” Mr. Jinn said, and he looked downright happy to hear it. “Mr. Tennin? Well, that’s a pleasant surprise for sure.”

  He seemed very pleased with everything, which I couldn’t understand based on the fact that Abra had the Tree. Why wasn’t he more worried? I was very worried.

  “We’re not too late, are we? We can still bring my mom back, right?”

  “Sam,” he said, “if we can get that Tree of Life, it won’t be too late for anything.”

  He turned and walked away. The Amarok backed away alongside him, ducking to miss the low crossbeams in the ceiling. But before it got too far away it became unrecognizable, blending in with the midday shadows in the corners of the barn.

  “What should I do?” I asked, suddenly overwhelmed at what remained to be done.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing,” he said loudly without turning around. “Find the remaining items and bring everything to me.”

  I heard the barn door opening. He shouted one more thing back to me.

  “It’s never too late!”

  I sat down and realized I was shaking. I closed my eyes and put my head back against the wall. Why did things have to change so much? Why did my mom have to die? Why did I have to make all of these decisions on my own?

  When I opened my eyes, I saw the door open at the far end of the barn. Abra came down the long aisle.
r />   “Hey,” she said.

  I looked at her, and I wondered, did she have it? Was she the only thing standing between me and bringing my mom back?

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mr. Jinn came by.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said to get the remaining items. He’ll take care of the rest.”

  “So he does have the Tree,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Jinn. We were right,” she said as if everything had been revealed to her. “He has the Tree. Why else wouldn’t he be concerned about you not having it? He didn’t even push you for it. When’s the last time you had a conversation with him and he wasn’t asking you over and over again for the Tree?”

  I wanted to scream and shout and accuse her of being a terrible friend, a liar, someone who wanted to keep my mom under the ground in that cold, damp grave. But for some reason the darkness inside me felt stronger than ever, and it told me to remain calm. So I listened to it.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said.

  “My mom said she’ll take us to the fair, but only for an hour or so,” Abra said.

  “Let’s go find the stone bowl,” I said, standing up and walking past her.

  27

  ABRA’S MOM DROPPED US OFF at the fair entrance and drove into town to run some errands, and as Abra and I walked onto the fairgrounds, I found myself feeling disappointed. At night, the fair seemed edgy and exciting. The flashing lights seared their images into my brain. The mirror maze and the haunted house felt like truly dangerous undertakings, and the shadows that drifted in the margins of the snapping tent flaps held mysteries and unknown terrors.

  But during the day, the fair was ordinary. The gravel paths were filled with stale cigarette butts, and the toothless old man collecting the trash, who at night bore the appearance of a man who might steal little children, looked harmless. He even smiled at us as we walked past. Carnies lounged in their tents that lined the midway, napping or staring off at the horizon. They looked like real people during the day, not like the caricatures from fairy tales that they were at night.

  When we had been at the fair after dark, finding the Tree of Life had felt like a distinct possibility. But in the light of a normal weekday, it all seemed too fantastic to be true. The Tree of Life? An Amarok? A stone bowl? Three old women and angels and a sword that burned me when I touched it? All of it seemed hard to believe, like a dream I had awoken from.

  Still, we wandered down through the various sections of the fair, past the food and the animals and the kiddie rides. The rides’ lights were on, but they were bleached out by the sun. A few small children screamed as the rides whipped them around. A few of the carnies called out to us, encouraging us to try their games of skill, but their voices were ordinary and tired, and they weren’t very persistent.

  We passed the Ferris wheel and the large trucks parked just below it and wandered into the section of the fair where the carnies lived during the week. It was as boring as the rest of the fair, perhaps even more so because it was completely quiet. I guess they were all still in bed after a long night. A stale summer breeze wandered through the tents and RVs, rustling the canvas and tossing the long grass from side to side. A black and white dog, tied to a stake outside the entrance to a tent, perked up its ears as we walked past but must have decided it couldn’t be bothered. It set its head back down on its paws and watched us pass without making a sound.

  “There’s the tent,” Abra said, pointing down the hill to a green tent with a blue tarp over the door. I nodded. That was the tent the man had disappeared into with the bowl. Like everything else, it looked ordinary.

  Could we just go in and take the bowl? If he was there, how long would we have to wait until he left? We only had an hour. We walked through the long, trampled grass and stopped outside the tent.

  “Now what?” I whispered to Abra.

  “Hello?” she said in not much more than a loud whisper. “Hello? Anyone in there?”

  She took a deep breath, shrugged, pulled back the tarp, and looked inside. She glanced back at me with surprise on her face, then snuck carefully through the flap. I followed.

  The first thing I noticed was a loud, raspy sound, so intense that I was surprised I hadn’t heard it from outside the tent. I looked around, expecting to see some kind of machine click-click-clicking. I saw the man who had taken the bowl from the old women, lying on a mat on the floor, asleep.

  The sound was him snoring. Each inhale caught and snagged like a door on uneven hinges, and each exhale swept out like a new start. Abra and I took a few more steps into the large tent and stood there for a moment, staring at him. Resting on his stomach, clenched by both of his hands, was the stone bowl.

  It was the only thing I saw there that didn’t seem ordinary. The stone was a gray white, and it had flecks of something in it that sparkled, the way sand glints in the morning light, or the way a granite headstone sparkles when the sun comes out from behind a cloud. It was about a foot in diameter and hollowed out, the shape of a contact lens.

  “The dog?” Abra whispered and pointed, and I saw the man’s pet lying beside him, on its back, paws in the air, tongue lolling off to the side. It was asleep too. I looked at her and shook my head. I didn’t know what to do. We both took another step closer to the sleeping man and his dog. Then we heard the tent flap open just a few feet behind us.

  A woman came in through the opening. She was one of those particular creations of the fair, someone you see nowhere else. Her hair was shoulder length, her face was as wrinkled as a balled-up piece of tissue paper that’s been stretched flat again, and her body was skinny, a sack of bones. A cigarette perched between her purplish lips, and the watery whites of her eyes were more yellow than white. She wore a T-shirt three sizes too big for her, and it hung down around her knees. Her jeans were torn and dirty, and she wore work boots.

  In one hand she carried a butcher knife, and in the other hand she carried a white grocery bag dripping blood from the bottom corner.

  Abra leaned over closer to me, and I put my hands up, preparing to talk her out of murdering us. I kept expecting her to raise the knife and charge, or cry out to the man to wake up and bash us over the head with his stone bowl, or maybe she’d even wake the dog and tell it to attack us. But she did none of these things.

  She fell to her knees, dropped the knife and the bag, and started crying.

  “You’re here,” she cried out. “You’re really here.”

  Abra and I looked at each other. I probably would have been less startled if she had charged at us.

  “Thank God,” she said, sitting back on her ankles before taking a long drag from the cigarette. She exhaled the smoke. It hung heavy in the tent, and the longer we stayed, the foggier the tent became.

  “I’m sorry?” Abra said.

  “You’re here,” she said again. “Those three old hags said you’d come.”

  “They did?” I asked.

  She nodded. “They cursed my man with that bowl, and he’s been asleep ever since.”

  I looked over at her “man.” I found it hard to believe he was under any spell other than alcohol and laziness.

  “He’s been sleeping there ever since that night?” Abra asked her.

  She nodded again. “Came in here and lay down, and I didn’t think he was ever gonna wake up again,” she said, a fresh batch of tears flooding her eyes.

  “So . . . now what?” I said.

  “Take the bowl,” the woman said. “Just take that bowl and get outta here. That’s what those three old hags said, yes they did. ‘When two children come here for the bowl, and when they take the bowl, this man will wake up.’ That’s what they said, they did.”

  I looked at Abra and she looked at me.

  “What about the, um, dog?” I asked.

  “Him too,” she said, shaking
her head, regret on her face. “Him too.”

  So I took a few steps toward the man, bent over, and lifted the stone bowl. His hands let go of it easily, as if he was relieved to give it up. It was heavy, with a texture like sandpaper.

  When I first touched it, I thought I saw something in the bowl, like a shooting star traveling from one side to the other. But when I looked closer, all I saw was the shimmering of the stone. It had glints in it as if it were from another planet, another part of the universe. Or maybe another time.

  Abra held open the tent flap for me, but the woman never got up. In fact, she leaned forward, then back on her knees, and it sounded like she was praying as we left, or saying something like a prayer. I heard the man shift on his mat, and the dog made a whining sound. We emerged into the light and I had to squint—the sun was bright outside the tent. We walked, the two of us, through that quiet, ordinary day.

  Abra’s mom was so happy we showed up on time that she didn’t even ask us about the stone bowl, if she even saw it. We climbed into the back of the car without a word and put it on the seat between us. Once we got to Abra’s house, Mrs. Miller rushed inside to relieve Abra’s father of baby duty, and we were left staring at each other in the backseat of the car.

  We decided to hide the bowl in the cave in the cliff at the end of the Road to Nowhere. It was a long walk and the bowl was heavy, but we made our way through the woods, always looking around, always waiting for the sound of the Amarok in the shadows.

  We arrived at my mother’s grave in the cemetery in the woods. My breathing came faster, and I approached the bare, brown earth that had so recently been put on top of her coffin. Someone had left a bouquet of tulips resting against her headstone. They were yellow with streaks of red from the stem to the end of the petal. It was a deep red, like the low, evening sun. I got down on my knees and read the inscription on her stone.

  Lucy Leigh Chambers

  Wife and Mother

  Meet Me at the Edge of the World

  I noticed something protruding from under the dozen or so tulips, so I picked them up and set them on top of the headstone. And there it was, small and bright green with its own white flowers.