Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts

by Stephen Jones (ed)

  “Let’s go and look at the river,” she said, eventually.

  The grey shifted to a deeper hue and shrunk closer to frozen earth, as if the sky above had felt the darkening of our moods. We turned and headed to the river bank where trees rose up like the bones of ancient hands, gnarled and greedy and keen to grasp at anything that would stop the cold ground from dragging them down to be forgotten forever. Barely any hint of brown gasped from the empty branches lost beneath the snow and frost. The temperature dropped and my hot breath turned from steam to almost crystal as we crossed the path to stand overlooking the uneven river and the empty tundra that days before had simply been English fields. My lungs felt raw in the sudden cold.

  A few feet from the steep bank Amelie paused, and we stood in silence as the snow began to fall again. Heavy flakes appeared directly above us. They winked into existence at the edge of the grey, and within seconds the sky was falling towards us like drifting ash. I tilted my head up and felt each one land like the kisses of the dead brushing against my skin. More and more tumbled down until the wind caught the excitement and sent the storm whirling in a frenzy across the open spaces. I gasped, the snow and cold air fighting to fill my mouth and lungs first.

  Amelie simply smiled, and as the increasing flakes settled quickly on her head and coat, I thought she would be lost in the blizzard that gathered force around us. The wind bit at my exposed ears and cheeks and I stepped up beside Amelie in the small protection of a naked tree. Amelie stared at the river, ignoring the flakes that sat like glitter on her long eyelashes and clung to her skin. I followed her gaze, squinting against the snow that blew in every direction as if we were the center of a maelstrom.

  The river hadn’t frozen entirely but was covered in a slick sheen as ice fought to conquer the surface. The dark fluid beneath maintained supremacy over the white that had usurped the rest of the surrounding world, the water like a gash across the pale skin of the land. Amelie looked up, her eyes widening. She dropped her head, a flush blazing from her cheeks, and stared at the river again.

  “Can you see it? Can you see them?” she laughed, but both the sound and the words were muffled by the heavy air as if the blizzard were trying to create a void in the small space between her and myself. I frowned and stared. My eyes stung, and for a fleeting second I thought I may have seen a flash of purples and blues dancing brightly on the dark, freezing surface—a swirl of colors that were almost shapes in their own right, casting black shadows behind them. I blinked and looked up, forcing my eyes to stay open. All I could see was the tumbling snow.

  Amelie laughed again, and jumped slightly with excitement. “But they’re beautiful! Aren’t they beautiful?” She turned and grabbed my frozen hand with her own. The heat in it burned.

  “I can’t see. What are you looking at?”

  Her eyes shone, the blue so sharp it was as if all the ice in the field had been condensed into those tiny irises. Her cheeks were too flushed for our surroundings, too red against the absence of color.

  She gasped again and her eyes darted this way and that, following something beyond my sight and hidden by the falling snow. I wondered which of us the storm was mocking and decided maybe both. I shivered, suddenly aware of the deep chill that had sunk into my bones as fingers of pain squeezed at my spine.

  “Let’s go inside.” Over my shoulder, even the forbidding structure of The House was almost lost in the grip of the blizzard. The snow consumed everything it touched in the relentless onslaught, and I knew with a shiver that if we stayed out here much longer, it would devour us, too, and we would be lost forever. My feet were numb in my shoes and I stepped back slightly, pulling Amelie with me.

  “It’s too cold. I’m tired.”

  Her feet stayed planted as she stared, but her thin frame swayed.

  “Just two more minutes,” she whispered, a beatific smile on her beautiful face. “Please.”

  As it was, a quarter of an hour passed before the energy slumped from her shoulders and she turned to me with sad eyes and let me lead her back across the field and through the gate to the safety of our world, where children politely waited to die. We didn’t speak but went to our separate dormitories, dazed and blinded by the blizzard that had held us in a white embrace for most of the afternoon.

  Back in the brightness and warmth of the building my teeth rattled, shaking barely a flicker of warmth into my thin face and it took an hour soaking in a bath before the jaws of the freezing cold released their grip on me. The nurses glared balefully as I shuffled past in my dressing gown but said nothing. I didn’t expect them to.

  It was still snowing when night finally swallowed what little muted light the day had held. As The House slipped into slumber and took me with it, I dreamed that Death came in a white coat and smothered me while his black eyes glittered purple and blue reflections of something beautiful and terrible that was out of sight. I screamed in my nightmare, but his unflinching fingers burned and then froze my skin as he pulled me upwards, out of the mess of sheets and blankets. Behind him, two nurses waited patiently by the door, one pointing towards the corridor where the elevators were and the other holding a small cardboard box. I struggled, desperate to stay in my bed, not to be dragged to the sanatorium, and around me Death’s hands stretched and twisted, each digit hardening into wood until the sharp branches of the skeletal tree by the river had grown from his pale wrists and entangled me.

  I woke up scratching madly at my own hot, wet skin.

  The shivers and cold sweats grew worse, and by the morning my fever was raging and my throat burned as if every snowflake I had allowed to land on my tongue was a shard of glass embedded there.

  The nurses brought pills and hot drinks, and muttered quietly amongst themselves about the stupid boy and girl and what had they been thinking, especially her being so close to the ... and then they’d glance around and down at me, and from behind my haze I could see them wondering if I’d heard and the shutters would close over the parts of their eyes that mattered.

  I slept most of the day, and then forced some soup through the barbed wire of my insides and took more aspirin that would ease the flu that the nurses were allowed to treat, but give my ailing kidneys more to worry about.

  No one spoke to me, but in my more lucid moments, while the heat and infection raged through my body, I could see curious glances darted my way. I knew then how Will and all the others before him had felt as the slow isolation began. I knew what the quiet watchers were thinking. They thought the sanatorium would be welcoming me next and there was a relief in each of them—even poor confused Sam—that it wasn’t their turn quite yet.

  They stayed well back and flinched each time I coughed germs out at them. I knew these things without looking because I would have done the same. When I closed my eyes all I could see was falling snow against the crimson dark backdrop. Finally I slept.

  The House was still when Amelie woke me. Her face shone in the half-light like the glaze that had been forming on the river, and her long hair hung in lank matted strands. There was barely a hint of blonde left. Her hand was hot on mine.

  “I want to go out,” she whispered. “I want you to see. I want to see.”

  She licked her lips and her mouth trembled.

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “It’s nearly dawn. I can’t sleep. Please.”

  “Amelie ...” I let my sentence drift off. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to go out. The snow still held a mystery in it, but the cruel cold frightened me. Across the room, Sam stirred in his sleep and barked out a word that meant nothing but was spat fresh into the world with a vehemence I’d never heard from the boy with the easy grin. At night, the cancers ruled our sleep. I looked at Amelie’s burning face and knew that I loved her more than I feared the cold grip of the blizzard.

  “Okay.”

  Her fragile smile was almost worth it. I pushed back the covers and shivered, but my skin was cooling. Unlike Amelie’s, my fever had b
egun to break somewhere between dusk and now, and although my limbs ached and my back was on fire, I knew the worst of that particular illness was over.

  We moved like silent ghosts through the dark house, and wrapped ourselves up in coats and scarves housed in the rarely used cloakroom and turned the old-fashioned key in the back door. The lock clicked loudly. For a second the falling snow paused as if to welcome us. The cold air crept into the house carrying a handful of flakes on its wings, and as they came in to melt and die on the stone floor, we pulled the door closed and stepped out into the drift.

  This time Amelie didn’t hesitate or waste time giggling and laughing and clutching at handfuls of the elusive white that now sat several inches high over the frozen ground. Instead, she took my hand and led me out through the garden and across the field to the riverbank. By the time we reached it, The House was a lifetime away and looked like a dark dead thing pasted against the night. My hair was soaked from the relentless snow, and my shins were damp from where the icy wetness had crawled up my jeans above my shoes. My skin tingled with the cold and I flinched with every breath drawn in against my ragged throat.

  Equally wet and surely as cold as I, Amelie simply smiled as we reached the slope and stood in the shelter of the frost-gripped tree that had plagued my dreams. The sky was slowly creeping from black to midnight blue, and the snow fell like stars or diamonds forever tumbling against it. I looked at the river. It had lost the battle with the ice since our last visit, and streaks and lines of crystals cut like fractures across the hard sheet of the surface.

  “They’ll come,” Amelie whispered. “I know it.”

  We stood like that as the sky shifted above us, the blue fading to grey as dawn broke. My body numbed and my skin burned with outrage as the cold tortured it with bitter kisses, but I stayed staring at the river and wondering what I was doing here, knowing in my heart it was simply for the love of the dying, feverish girl beside me.

  When the sky and the horizon blended into the same shade, becoming one endless vision of deathly grey, Amelie suddenly laughed and clapped her hands to her mouth.

  “They’re here!” she said, and jumped up and down on the spot where she stood while my own legs screamed if I even tried to bend them.

  “They’re here,” she repeated, and her whisper escaped in a mist. As she looked upwards, I stared at the river. At the center of the frozen water streams of purples and blues twisted on the surface. Flashes of sparkling lights came simultaneously from the air above and the water below, as if the colors were reflecting from within the ice rather than on the crackled surface. The snow paused, hesitant, as the unnaturally bright colors grew denser. They spiraled and flashed too vividly against the grey that had swallowed the world to be part of it, and yet each of the mad hues had been distilled from the ghosts of colors that lived at the edge of each flake of snow, just out of sight, but held fast in the molecules.

  My breath stopped. I was aware of Amelie’s joy beside me, but my own moment had locked me in so completely that she might have been miles away. I slowly looked up, dragging my eyes from the dazzling array on the river to the sharp white of the endless horizon. I gasped. Hazes of colors stretched across the sky right above our heads, their purity made clearer against the backdrop of emptiness and I wondered if somehow these were the Northern Lights dragged to us upon the wind. The numbness in my feet crept away. With an imperceptible sigh the blizzard came again, and as the snow launched itself around us, whipping around our slim frames, the colors pulled in on themselves. Faces formed in the flying streams, sharp eyes and beautiful smiles that danced and flew in the wind.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” Amelie’s dull hair rose up around her head as the cold air rushed through it, fingers made from icy flakes curiously teasing each strand. Her words barely reached me, the snow thick between us as the creatures in the sky whirled around, examining us. The snow felt like butterfly wings on my skin despite the urgent power of the breeze. For a moment, I thought she was right. They were beautiful. They were angels—snow angels, come to share something wonderful with us. I stared in awe until the air shifted and the moment changed. The angels separated, darting this way and that across the sky before coming back.

  Amelie continued to laugh with delight beside me, but my heart froze. The lights in the angels’ eyes hardened. The glittering smiles stretched and yawned wide, and I was sure that sharp teeth of black ice flashed from within. And then they rushed at me.

  The blizzard was suddenly hard against my skin and snow stung my eyes. I flinched. The wings that beat at me were sticks, not feathers, and as I raised one arm to protect my face the wind forced it down. I squeezed my eyes almost shut, but even through the haze of attacking white I could see the cruel laughter in their eyes and feel their cold breath burning my skin—rotten water dragged from the pit of a stagnant frozen well. Tears streamed from the corners of my battered eyes and the monstrous creatures licked them away.

  My feet tried to pull me backwards, but I was stuck on the riverbed, held in place by the snow and the wind and the whirling beings that tore at my skin with greedy fingers. They spoke in whispers that I couldn’t quite make out, the words like freezing water in my ears. They sucked the air from my lungs, leaving only an icy void inside me, and through the madness I thought I saw something terrible and dark waiting just behind them—a creature hungrier and meaner and with no mercy, that lived in the blackness hidden just beyond the light.

  I don’t know how long I stood there. When the wind eventually fell, letting the lifeless snow simply drift to the ground, every inch of my being stung. My fingers and face tingled. My insides were made of ice. Amelie turned and half-collapsed on me, but the smile stayed stretched across her thin, pale face. It was only as we reached half-way across the blanketed field back to The House, my legs barely carrying me, and with Amelie leaning weakly on my arm, that I realized my back no longer hurt. It ached, yes, but it didn’t burn. Something had changed.

  I think I knew what would happen. It snowed for a further two days, during which time Amelie’s fever grew worse. There were unspoken whispers about the sanatorium as she lay listless and sweating in her bed. For my own part, my throat raged and my voice died, but even though the nurses kept me confined to the dormitory and filled me with hot drinks, I could see their immediate concern for me had passed. The boys drifted back over to my side of the room, even poor Sam who would barely see the thaw before they wheeled him upstairs with blood pouring from his nose and his eyes gazing in two different directions.

  It was on the second morning that the alarm went up. As with everything in The House, it happened quietly. There were no screams or shouts, simply a shift in the atmosphere. A hurriedness in the nurses’ movements. It was seven o’clock in the morning. Amelie’s bed was empty, only her thin pathetic outline left in the damp sheet.

  I knew where she was. I let them search The House before squeezing the painful words “the river” out from my swollen throat. The snow had stopped, and when I stepped outside the sun shone bright against an azure blue sky, promising a return to normality. We crunched across the field, my small boots following in the remains of Amelie’s last footsteps, their outline barely visible unless you’d known where to look.

  She sat frozen on the side of the riverbank. Her hands were wrapped around her knees, and she wore only her nightdress. Her feet were bare. The nurses and I paused a short distance away, and I’m sure I heard one of them let out a tiny gasp. It wasn’t that she was dead. We were all used to death, and seeing her sitting there in the thin cotton I knew it couldn’t have taken her very long to slip from one state to the other, and for that my breaking heart was glad. Her death we had all been expecting ever since we’d stepped into the cold February air. That didn’t make the nurse pause, or my mouth fall open.

  It was her hair.

  It hung like spun gold down her back, glorious and healthy, the color it must have been before she started dying in earnest and The House claimed her. It
was beautiful. Magical. And by all rights, it just couldn’t be. Her head was tilted backwards, as if she’d been staring at the sky when she died, and a smile danced on her mouth, her lips pink against cheeks that had lost their pallor and become fuller and flushed. She looked radiant but, as I stepped closer, I thought I saw crystals of blue and purple fear at the edges of her eyes, and there was the shadow of something dark behind them as if in the final breath she’d seen something unpleasant and unexpected.

  All the children in The House died apart from me. I watched them go in turn and saw how they hated me as my body grew stronger as theirs weakened. After a year, the doctor’s ran more tests and found the tumors on my kidneys had shrunk to nothing. They could do nothing but let me out. My childhood, such as it was, continued in foster care. My parents didn’t want me back. I had been defective once, and could be again. They weren’t prepared to take the risk.

  As it turns out, they were right. Six months ago, just after I turned thirty-five, the pain came back. Governments had changed and cancer treatment was back on the menu. Not for me, though. Too aggressive, is what the doctors said. In their eyes I saw the ghosts of the nurses and the elevators to the sanatorium.