Try to sleep.
Snowdrifts are up to the windows, and I drink scotch and watch the septic swirls of smoke from the refineries. Listen to arguments in the street spilling from bars. The laughter and alcohol madness. The frantic despair of the voices, their pathetic, greedy noise. They are all damned. They will get sick and become empty and agony will ravage them.
Poison seeks itself.
From my window, I stare at the anemic expanse that leads back to Fairbanks. I measure the numbing monotony with bloodshot eyes. The undetected things beneath. Terrified expressions, twisted limbs, torn flesh. The couples and the ones who were alone. I imagine them all under the vast ice, finally where they should be. Here, they will always look the same, forever preserved, unable to make bad decisions, demolish lives. I saved them. If they could, they would spiral from the countless openings I drilled, vaporous and sorrowful, wanting to be forgiven. But it’s too late. Salvation is not given to the irredeemable.
I can feel the scotch and my skin hurts where scars seam my scathed features.
Sometimes when I dream, I watch myself drilling the thick blue ice. I make a large opening and stand over it, then step into it and slip through. I slide through the narrow opening and into the ancient sea underneath and, as currents gently sweep me away, I finally relax. My bad thoughts and fears stop and I look up through the ice and see a world I never belonged in, that never wanted me.
People don’t care.
They do what they want. They ruin their life. They ruin yours. They take and take. Smother everything good, give nothing back. Like my family did. It’s the same everywhere I go. Every other truck route across this fucked-up country. I bring them here, where no one will find them. But none are missed. When I give them back to the sea, maybe there is some balance in this damaged, indifferent world.
I remember the one from last week. Refinery worker. Nervous. On his way to Deadhorse. Black oil under his fingernails, unslept eyes. We pulled out of Fairbanks as the weather got bad. The windshield iced over and my rig’s steel wipers ground at it. He glanced over at me, thanked me for the lift. I offered him coffee from my thermos and he said yes, in a polite voice. But I could tell he was a person who hurt others and derived pleasure when they begged. I could detect in his casual conversation that he cared only for himself and that anyone stupid enough to get close to him would suffer. As he sipped, he glanced at my pistol mounted on my door bracket. Looked back at me. We hit a rut, duct tape rolled from under the seat and the blizzard swallowed us whole.
That was that.
Just like the ones I met in San Diego. And down south. Back east. Tulsa. So many voices and faces. I get people talking while we drink coffee so I can write down the details later. Otherwise, I lose track. They’re all narcissists. Bullies. All 361 of them talked about themselves, only a handful ever asked me a question about myself or faith or where their soul might be bound. Vain, worthless assholes.
The longest recorded night in Prudhoe was fifty-four days. The shortest was twenty-six minutes. No matter where you are, it is a world of extremes. Each must make peace with that somehow, each in their own way. Heaven and Hell are not so different. Sometimes, in summer, when mosquitoes swarm, it gets warm here and the Aurora Borealis makes you swear you can see your whole life in its randomness. Time and places. Hurts. The faces of people who never cared. The strangers who did you wrong. The rape and torture.
The world is a diseased zoo.
As I listen to them laughing like banshees, on the icy street outside, I’m exhausted and sore. When generators die, and lights go out and my room turns black, I stumble hard against the small dresser and hear its mirror fall and shatter. I always turn mirrors around in my motel rooms, even tape blankets over them so I never have to see. But after a minute, the generator starts back up, the lights flicker and I glance down, without thinking, to avoid shards in my bare feet.
As the bulbs twitch, I see splinters of a terrible face I had forgotten. A scarred mosaic of every face in my family, the mouth an ugly slash like my father’s, the eyes filled with sick contempt and futility like my mother’s. The nose crammed and broad and common like my brother’s. I stare at myself, reflected in vicious jigsaw fragments, and weep.
And though I fight its truth, I understand, at that instant, that I am guilty and damned. I am not of Heaven but Earth. I take. Give nothing back. I am no better than anyone. Sadism and suffering is all I know; I was raised with it. I am one of them. My heart is an Inquisition, my thoughts are vile and filthy. God has abandoned me and I am forsaken.
I have been drinking sand.
When day breaks in Deadhorse, I am broken. Betrayed. I dress and shower and I tell the front-desk man I will pay for the mirror and he tells me it is seven years of bad luck. He smiles like a lizard and I want to put a bullet in his head. Outside, engines are freezing up and plans changing. Workers need to get across the Big Blank, some with no means. I walk to the diner for coffee and a young woman with willing eyes asks me for a lift to Fairbanks. I refuse and tell her I’m not going all the way through. She doesn’t know what I mean since the road ends where it ends and nowhere else.
Fuck her. Fuck everyone. Fuck God most of all. For his lies; for making me believe them.
I get in my rig and head toward Fairbanks, thinking about how the world is worthless and can never be saved. Like my family. Like me. The psychiatrist was right but I couldn’t understand. He came to my ward and led me out into the garden and tried to help me. I thought he was evil, trying to cure an angel. I cut out his tongue with shears, got out of that place and moved on. We all have regrets.
The falling snow starts to wall me in and I drive faster, ignoring the speed limit. I reach a stretch of the Dalton with thin ice and push the engine harder, speeding over the slick surface. My steering wheel shakes as the rig starts to create waves under the road that will make it buckle ahead, the undulations like a massive blanket slowly shaken in the wind.
As my tires wobble, I look over and see my brother on hillocks of white, with the sawed neck I gave him; a gory joker’s collar. Beside him is my murdering father and my sadistic mother. Both staring, unblinking, waiting for me because they know I am no better than they are and never will be, and that I belong in the icy water with them for what I did.
I feel the sea shuddering below the road as the waves roll thicker and begin to break the ice and the two-lane starts to crack under the weight of my truck. It suddenly ruptures like a pane of broken glass and my engine is a roaring, wounded creature as a wide crack races toward me. Then, another. Then, more, wider and faster, the erupting waves tearing the road open.
The tires spin and I downshift, and my rig abruptly stops and hitches into the dark slush. My seat belt holds me tight against the sudden lurch and my fog lights shine on the collapsing road as it cracks apart, the water churning beneath, leaking upward. The rig begins to make hideous, scraping noises and the huge front tires and grille nose into the shattered roadway as the massive engine slowly dies and sea sloshes up to my doors, wanting me. I watch it without reaction and know I deserve this.
I slowly open my windows.
The freezing water gushes in, lapping at me, and I gasp at the aching cold, drinking in icy saltiness that fills me. I watch my belongings move, in slow motion, in the inundated cab, the inked pages in my notebook running, details and names washed off the paper; my pious, repellent spree. The truck creaks and tilts, huge trailers wrenched and twisting, and I look up through the windshield as sea submerges us and we slowly descend into green-black Ocean.
My dreams were premonitions. But they were wrong.
As we drown, I see murky images, drifting closer.
I can just make them out and am afraid as they move toward me with gunshot faces, slashed throats, many without legs or arms, mouths duct-taped. Pale crowds of them emerge through kelp, mutilations fresh, bloody clothes billowing. Wanting to hurt me as I hurt them.
They tear at me and I look up to see a place I nev
er belonged; that never wanted me.
The sea goes red and I am finally home.
EVIDENCE OF ANGELS
Graham Masterton
GRAHAM MASTERTON was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where his story “Evidence of Angels” is set. His career as a horror writer began almost accidentally in 1975. Up until then, as the editor of both Penthouse and Forum magazines, he had been making his name as the writer of hugely successful sex-instruction manuals, such as How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed. When the bottom fell out of that particular market, he offered his publishers The Manitou, a story about a Native American medicine man who was reborn in the present day to take his revenge. It was subsequently turned into a movie starring Tony Curtis.
He has followed it with more than 100 horror novels and stories, many of which have been adapted for television and graphic novels. His latest books include Blind Panic (the fifth and final Manitou novel), Fire Spirit, Ghost Music, Descendant and Demon’s Door, the latest in the Jim Rook series.
Masterton was the first Western horror novelist to be published in Poland, and he and his wife, Wiescka, are frequent visitors to Warsaw, Poznan and Wroclaw.
“I was given the idea for ‘Evidence of Angels’ by a friend in the Human Development department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison,” remembers the author. “His friend had filmed small children taking their first steps and concluded that they could only be walking with the help of some invisible support. That support, those helping hands, could only be those of some unseen guardian.
“In other words, an angel.”
BEFORE HE WAS BORN she loved him with a fierce and sisterly love, and called him Alice. Her mother let her rest her head against her stomach to hear his heart beating inside her, and sometimes she felt the strong fleshy ripple of his kicking. With some of the money that her parents had given her for her thirteenth birthday, she went to Jenner’s and bought him a little lace-collared dress in the Stewart tartan, and kept it hidden to surprise him on the day that he was due to be born.
She was so sure that he was going to be a girl that she played out imaginary scenes in her head, in which she taught Alice her first ballet steps; and in which they danced the opening scenes of La Fille Mal Gardée to amuse their mother and father. And she imagined taking her for walks on winter mornings up to the Castle Mound, where strangers would stop and coo at Alice and think that Gillie was Alice’s mother, instead of her older sister.
But one January morning she heard her mother crying out; and there was a lot of running up and downstairs. And father drove mother off to the Morningside Clinic, while the snow swarmed around them like white bees, and eventually swallowed them up.
She spent the day with Mrs. McPhail, who was their cleaner, in her neat cold house in Rankeillor Street, with its ticking clocks and its strong smell of lavender polish. Mrs. McPhail was tiny and disagreeable, and kept twitching her head like a chicken. She gave Gillie a bowl of greyish stew for lunch, with onions in it, and watched and twitched while Gillie miserably pushed it around and around, and the snow on the kitchen windowsill heaped higher and higher.
Mrs. McPhail’s rotary washing line stood at an angle in the center of her backyard, and that was clogged up with snow, too. It looked to Gillie like a seraph, with its wings spread; and as she looked, the sun suddenly broke out from behind the clouds, and the seraph shone, dazzling and stately, yet tragic, too, because it was earthbound now, and now could never hope to return to Heaven.
“Do you no care for your dinner?” asked Mrs. McPhail. She wore a beige sweater covered with pills of worn wool, and a brown beret, even indoors. Her face made Gillie think of a plate of lukewarm porage, with skin on, into which somebody had dropped two raisins for eyes, and drawn a downward curve with the edge of their spoon, for a mouth.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. McPhail. I suppose I’m not very hungry.”
“Good food going to waste. That’s best lamb, and barley.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
But then, unexpectedly, the disagreeable Mrs. McPhail smiled at her, and said, “Don’t fash yourself, darling. It’s not every day that you get a new baby, now, is it? Now what do you think it’ll be? A boy or a girl?”
The thought of it being a boy had never entered Gillie’s head. “We’re going to call her Alice,” she said.
“But what if she’s a he?”
Gillie put down her fork. The surface of her stew was floating with small globules of fat. But it wasn’t the stew that made her feel nauseous. It was the unexpected idea that her mother might have been harboring a brother, instead of a sister. A brother! A son and heir! Wasn’t that what grandma had always complained about, every time that they visited her? “Such a pity you never had a son and heir, Donald, to carry on your father’s name.”
A son and heir wouldn’t want to learn ballet steps. A son and heir wouldn’t want to play with her doll’s house, which she had carefully brought down from the attic, and fitted with new carpets, and a dining table, and three plates of tiny plaster-cast meals with sausages and fried eggs.
She had saved for so long for that tartan dress. Supposing the baby was a boy? She flushed at her own stupidity.
“You look feverish, pet,” said Mrs. McPhail. “Don’t eat your dinner if you don’t feel like it. I’ll warm it up for later. How about some nice pandowdie?”
Gillie shook her head. “No, thank you,” she whispered, and tried to smile. In the backyard, the sun had vanished, and the sky was growing grim; but the rotary clothesline looked more like a wrecked angel than ever. She could hardly bear to think of it standing there, throughout the night, unloved, and abandoned, and unable to fly.
“Let’s watch telly,” said Mrs. McPhail. “I can’t miss Take the High Road. I wouldnie have a thing to talk about tomorrow, doon the bingo.”
They sat on the clumpy brown sofa and watched television on Mrs. McPhail’s blurry ex-rental television set. But every now and then, Gillie would look over her shoulder at the seraph in the backyard, watching his wings grow larger and thicker as the snow fell faster still. Perhaps he would fly, after all.
Mrs. McPhail was noisily sucking a humbug. “What do you keep keekin’ at, pet?”
Gillie was embarrassed at first. But somehow she felt that she could tell Mrs. McPhail almost anything, and it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t get “reported back,” the way that her grandma had once reported her comments about school back to her mother and father.
“It’s your clothesline. It looks like an angel.”
Mrs. McPhail twisted herself around and stared at it. “With wings, you mean?”
“It’s only the snow.”
“But you’re right, pet. That’s just what it looks like. An angel. Seraphim and cherubim. But they always arrive, don’t you know, when a baby arrives. It’s their duty to take good care of them, those little ones, until they can stand on their own two feet.”
Gillie smiled and shook her head. She didn’t understand what Mrs. McPhail was talking about, although she didn’t like to say so.
“Every child has a guardian angel. You have yours; your new baby has hers. Or his. Whatever it’s turned to be.”
It has to be Alice, thought Gillie, desperately. It can’t be a son and heir. “Would you like a sweetie?” asked Mrs. McPhail, and offered her the sticky, crumpled bag.
Gillie shook her head. She was trying to give up sweeties. If she couldn’t make the grade as a ballerina, she wanted to be a supermodel.
By four o’clock it was dark. Her father came at five o’clock and stood in the porch of Mrs. McPhail’s house with snow on his shoulders and whisky on his breath. He was very tall and thin, with a tiny sandy moustache and bright grey eyes like the shells you could find on Portobello Beach before they went dry. His hair was thinning on top and it was all sprigged up.
“I’ve come to take you home,” he said. “Your mum’s well and the baby’s well and everything’s fine.”
“You’ve been celebrating, Mr. Drummond
,” said Mrs. McPhail, with mock disapproval. “But you’ve every right. Now tell us what it was and how much it weighed.”
Dad laid both his hands on Gillie’s shoulders and looked right into her eyes. “You’ve a baby brother, Gillie. He weighed seven pounds, six ounces and we’re going to call him Toby.”
Gillie opened her mouth but she couldn’t speak. Toby? Who was Toby? And what had happened to Alice? She felt as if Alice had been secretly spirited away, and her warm place in her mother’s womb given to some strange and awful boy-baby whom she didn’t know at all, the human equivalent of a cuckoo.
“That’s grand!” said Mrs. McPhail. “No wonder you’ve been taking the malt, Mr. Drummond! And a cigar, too, I shouldn’t be surprised!”
“Well, Gillie?” asked her father. “Isn’t it exciting! Think of all the fun you’ll be able to have, with a baby brother!”
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 19