Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  Jamie paused in his telling and took a drink of water. The pause stretched out until Vanya said, arms hugged tightly to his middle, “You will not stop there please. There is more, yes?”

  Jamie nodded and with a strange smile upon his face, continued.

  Once there was and once there was not a boy named Jack who lived in an emerald kingdom by the sea.

  Like most boys, Jack kept the things that mattered to him in his pockets. One pocket held the stones he collected: some amber, some of interesting shape, some with odd sparkly bits to them and some just because he liked the heft of them in his palm. In with the stones were other oddments: a ball of fuzzy string, a piece of heavy glass, the wing of a dragonfly and the skull of a dormouse that he had found one day in the field by the stream that ran past his house. In his other pocket he kept his dreams. Some of them were solid things, others were delicate wispy things that were only starting to take shape. Some would start to form and then blow out like smoke dispersing from a fire. He never knew from one day to the next what he might find when he pulled his dreams out of his lefthand pocket and examined them. Some days there would be lovely cloud horses that trotted off his hand and out into the air before turning and coming back, and once a sailboat that just kept going and disappeared over the horizon. Sometimes too, they were dark things, a little nasty—like the smoke-toad that had melted into a grubby puddle right there and dripped through his fingers. Once there had even been a little girl made of lavender fog who had turned on his hand and stuck her tongue out at him before hopping off and skipping into the bramble hedge.

  The thing with a pocketful of dreams was this—you had to be careful with them, had to pay attention to which ones disappeared and which ones stayed and grew more solid day by day. Because sometimes when you weren’t looking, a nightmare would slip itself in and take charge of the rest. That was how the Crooked Man had gotten into his pocket and stayed. He wasn’t always visible but Jack knew that he was there, or if he did go off for a bit—and he never wanted to know where the Crooked Man’s journeys took him—he always came back, and Jack was aware that he would return. The Crooked Man was hard to explain for he had only started out as a wee smudge in Jack’s dream pocket, nothing to claim much attention. But then Jack noticed that if he had a bad day or was particularly angry or lonely, the smudge would gain size and start to shape into something.

  He wasn’t ever sure, after, when the Crooked Man actually became a man, or if he always had been only Jack didn’t know it at first. He thought perhaps it had been the day he discovered the hole in his pocket and found to his dismay that a few of his dreams had fallen out. He had looked everywhere for them but hadn’t been able to find a single one. They weren’t in the hedges, nor in the puddles, nor in the flower garden, nor in the big glass birdcage where his father kept his books and important papers. He had been distraught but then, in the way of young boys, he had gone out skipping rocks and forgotten about the lost dreams.

  It was only a few days later that he was playing in the forest at the edge of the Kingdom, even though his nanny had told him many times not to go there alone. He had been happily absorbed in building a fire using only acorns, when the most horribly shivery feeling slid along his back, as if an icy snake had wound its way up his spine. He was scared to look round, for he knew suddenly that he wasn’t alone and that whatever or whoever was there with him was most definitely not a good thing or person.

  His grandmother had told him that it was wrong to think only humans know desire, for the moon was born of the earth’s desire, the ocean stirred to the call of the galaxy each and every day, and the forest had its own dark and silent desires. Any boy or girl could feel it once they stepped into the forest’s embrace, when home was too far behind and the path faded out from beneath their feet. Then before they knew it, the entire world was made of great looming trees that knew far more than men, knowledge passed through roots and rain, through dark ground slitherers and eyes that only opened at night.

  He turned round slowly, putting on his most scowlingest face, thinking it best to look fierce for whatever he was about to confront. At first he couldn’t see anything. There was only the familiar forest—the rowans with their bright spark berries, the hazels with the milk-capped mushrooms on their branches, and the heavy oaks that always seemed like old stern men with great grey beards to Jack. Nothing seemed out of place, yet…

  No, he couldn’t see anything in particular, but he could feel it. The woods looked much as they always did, being trees and having little choice about it. But then—there—he saw a disturbance amongst the leaves that lay thick upon the forest floor. They were moving as though something writhed beneath them.

  The leaves crept and slithered into the air, just a few inches at first, swirling slowly in a dreadful vortex, taking shape, becoming worn boots and then legs and a trunk and chest and neck. Before him stood a tall, headless man, spectral as a scarecrow in a shorn field on All Hallow’s Eve. Jack knew he should turn and run, but he was frozen to the spot, acorns smoldering at his feet. Terror slowly filled him, from the toes up, the sort that made you feel sick and light at the same time, as though you were unable to run because your whole body would just float up and stay hovering in the dreaded spot.

  The leaves kept rustling ever higher, forming a face, high cheekbones, a long mouth with terrible lips, hollowed out holes that burned like the eyes of a jack-o’-lantern and long hair that hung lank to the man’s shoulders. The leaves clustered and built upon the head becoming a hat, with a deep, tattered brim that put a shadow over the man’s face, leaving only the sharp chin and hideous smile in view.

  The figure slid forward, and Jack felt hypnotized by its strange sibilant hissing that was more like the sound of dead leaves scuttling down an empty laneway than any sort of speech. Still, Jack knew the man was calling him, beckoning him with those long leafy fingers, wanting to take him down, down, down into a very dark place.

  He could smell the man, and the scent of him was burning leaves and water that lay still and dank in deep pools. It was blood and hot marrow and the cracking of bones under a predator moon. It was secrets that you didn’t ever want to hear, and knowledge that would shame the devil.

  The fingers reached out, unfurled slowly and touched Jack’s cheek with their cold frond ends. It was the touch that broke the spell and Jack ran, ran like quicksilver flowed in him instead of boy’s blood, ran like the wind was his mother and the white stag his father. He ran for so long and so far that when he finally stopped, he had no idea where he was. He had a vague memory of crossing a stream, running over hills and the day becoming night, then once again becoming day… but no, that was impossible. No boy could run for that long.

  When Jack stopped to regain his breath and rest his legs, he found himself in a strange world where nothing looked familiar. Surely he couldn’t have run right out of the kingdom, for its lands ran to the horizon and beyond.

  Perhaps in his exhaustion he had taken a wrong turn somewhere—but where? He was certain that it was only moments ago that he had seen the blasted rowan tree, the one that had been struck by lightning three harvests ago and scented the air around it with cinders ever since. And if that was so, he had to be on the right pathway. Yet nothing looked familiar. But then the forest never did look familiar once twilight settled over it. The trees kept their own counsel at night and were no friend to man, his mother had often warned. Indeed, the forest did feel very different at night, though not this different.

  It was cold too, and there were no lights anywhere, not a hint of warmth through the dark and twisted branches of the trees. He turned in circles, panic spreading through his limbs, desperately searching for something, anything that would tell him which direction would set his feet on the path home. For Jack realized that home was what he wanted more than anything right this minute—a fire burning in his old nursery room, the scent of hot buttered toast and the stiff rust
le of Nanny’s petticoats, the lovely heat of a cup of tea in one’s hands, and a bed with a feather mattress and quilts heaped high. A small sob escaped his lips as he realized what he had left behind. It was then that Jack realized, with a terrible shiver across his soul, that he was well and truly lost.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  May 1973

  Underneath the Stars

  The chapel attached to the ancient monastery had long ago been stripped of its sacred vestments and was used now as storage for supplies by the camp administration. The main body of the chapel was open, with a rough workbench left under a section of the roof that had fallen in long ago. It was a stark place, yet the sense of sacred communion remained and Jamie could well imagine what it had once been. For above the onion towers, all five of them, representing Christ and the four evangelists, still soared toward heaven, their shape designed for the easy slippage of prayers upward. The bell tower stood empty. Once the bells would have tolled out many times a day, a ringing reminder to the faithful. But that had been long ago, much longer in the hearts of men than in the actual passage of time.

  If he closed his eyes and let his mind slip to another time and place, he could conjure it up—the thousands of candles lit in continual prayers, the heavy torpor of the incense. Here they might well have used the resin of the great fir trees that surrounded them, sweetened with the oil of flowers, the smoke of which took worship with it as it left, seeking God.

  The floor would have been a mass of movement, for in the Orthodox tradition they stood to worship.The interior of the church would be a blaze of color, for the Russians had believed that God was not only the God of Truth, but also of Beauty. The iconostasis, that frontier between earthly life and heaven, would have been filled with icons painted in the distinctive Russian style, an open book reminding one always of God, the saints with their thin-bladed noses and great deep eyes signifying the peace of the life to come. Icons were a song of faith to remind man of the redemption possible through the creation of art and beauty. The Soviets had destroyed as many as they could find.

  Stripped of its ornaments it might be, but it was also empty, and Jamie sought the solitude and peace of it as much as he was allowed.

  Tonight he was extremely tired, and knew he should seek his bed rather than hold a conversation with an absentee landlord. Nevertheless, here he sat on the rough bench beneath the hole in the roof so that he might have a view of the stars overhead.

  He was too tired to form words or even coherent thoughts, but some things were simply part of his memory’s lexicon, to pray for those he had left behind, to hope that they fared well and were safe and happy. To hold for a minute the pictures of home and to turn it over in his mind and then banish it before it could twist in his heart and take hold with thorn and root. Here too, he could allow the injustices and angers of the day to accumulate, to fall away, to become dust and to make room for the injustices and angers that would follow on the morrow.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling as though he could sleep here, sit until he crumbled from time and inertia and be swept away with all the other human detritus of the Soviet machine.

  He missed things. Without warning, longings would hit him like a splinter in the chest, digging hard under the skin: the taste of tea in the morning, the view out of the kitchen over the city, the homely smell of toast, the sound of Maggie’s heavy footsteps and how her tongue had never spared him except when he was small, but he had always known she loved him. He missed his stables, late in the evenings when it was just him and the horses, the scent of them and hay and well-oiled tack. He even missed the piles of paperwork on his desk each day, the invitations to events he had no wish to attend, the long columns of numbers that his brain had always loved for their ability to straighten out the universe. He missed things that he used to feel as burdens, for he saw them now for what they were—an involvement with and a love of the world, the world within which he had moved with such ease.

  He missed his dog and his favorite chair in the study, the one his grandfather always sat in, and he missed the way the moon rose over the oaks outside his study, spilling light across the floor in the evenings. He missed his small Protestant friend, Nelson. He thought of how the firelight turned Nelson’s brown hair into a burnished chestnut, how the child did not have a poker face at all but was a burgeoning chess player. He hoped that someone was making sure Nelson had pants that were long enough and lenses in his glasses to keep up with his weakening eyesight. But he knew, of course, Nelson would have those things because Pamela would see to it.

  Pamela. He tried not to remember, but sometimes a stray moment snuck in when he was too tired to ward it off. There was a night, just before Casey came to take her home, when the despair of waiting for her husband had been more than she could bear alone. She had crossed the space between herself and him in the study, knelt down on the floor and put her head in his lap the way a child would who desperately needed comfort. There had been nothing strained or awkward about the moment, and he had stroked her head, watching the play of his emerald ring against the night-blue silk of her hair.

  Around them, the old house was silent, peaceful, the only sound the fire in the grate hissing softly and the only feeling that of Pamela’s breath warm against his knee. In that deep silence, her hand had come up and lain softly over his, and so they had sat for a very long time as the night flowed over them and the stars pinwheeled across the heavens and slipped off to set in another sky, far away.

  “May I sit with you?” The voice seemed to come out of the ether and startled Jamie in his fugue of exhaustion. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to frighten you.”

  At the edge of the bench, copper hair a dull glow in the dim, stood Violet. He was momentarily stunned into open-mouthed silence, for she had done no more than nod curtly in his direction in all these weeks in the camp.

  He regained his faculties enough to nod and clear the dust from the bench.

  She sat down, tucking her hands between her knees, her shoulders rising up to meet the shorn edges of her hair.

  “You were praying?” she asked, a quiet curiosity in her words.

  “No—or yes, but only in a broken-down way. My relationship with God has always been difficult.”

  “On your side or on God’s?” she asked, smiling.

  “Both. Likely it’s more problematical for him,” he said returning the smile, despite his exhaustion. “Mostly I just come here for the peace.”

  “You can feel it though, can’t you? There’s something here, a presence. It’s more than mere emptiness.”

  “Yes,” he said, grateful suddenly for her company. It was true there was something here, whether the echoes of a faith that had been practiced once, or the presence of a spirit beyond the trappings of earthly woe. Still, it was here, indefinable as things of the soul always were, but undeniable.

  Her nose was tipped pink from the cool evening, charming against the camellia white of her skin. She was tiny, yet had a persona much larger than her physical size, and she exuded a kind of peace that quieted others merely by her proximity. He had been careful in his observations of her, once he had understood just who she was. He understood what it was that had drawn Andrei away from his elegant and icy wife to this woman. The fire that never left Andrei in peace would be tempered by this woman, and in her arms he had likely found brief moments of peace, that he had not been able to find elsewhere in his life.

  She touched the hollow of her throat, and closed her eyes. It was a gesture with which he was long familiar. He looked more closely and saw the glint of gold hidden beneath her uniform. Almost as invisible as faith, but somewhat more tangible.

  “You pray?” he asked. She looked at him sharply and he realized he had made a Western gaffe for in Russia, religion was more private than sex. God had never left Russia entirely, but had remained within hearts and minds, hidden in secret cupboards a
nd the memories of the peasants and the grandmothers. For her, it would be natural to think he prayed, for it was part and parcel of the Irish soul, but in Russia that same flame of faith had to be hidden to the point of snuffing it out.

  She spent a long moment studying his face, and he allowed it, not masking his thoughts.

  “Yes, I pray. I was raised by a peasant woman named Masha, as my mother was too busy with her Party duties, and the Party did not allow a true believer to show great affection to her child. Nights she studied at the Institute of Foreign Trade. Often it was just Masha and me, for my father was exiled and I was not allowed to speak of him. Masha was a devout Old Believer and she prayed morning and night and included me in all the rituals of her religion. When I was small, it was like believing in a fairytale or a ghost, something delicious that made me shiver. But as I got older, it became something deeper, something that formed a strange lifeline with a presence, an idea beyond the cold empire into which I was born. I suppose you could call me an internal immigrant. Outside I am a Soviet: inside I have left for a far country.”

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “For much the same reason as you are, Jamie—my relationship to Andrei.”

  He raised a questioning eyebrow and she smiled in response. “I see you are not the man for a simple explanation. I was the daughter of an exiled economist and that alone would have been enough. But I was also part of a group that started an underground newspaper called The Record. The idea was to make a record of all the unpublicized news events in the Soviet Union: human rights abuses, arrests, trials, demonstrations, samizdat publications—and hope that we could smuggle it out to the West to bring attention to what was happening inside Russia.

  “You have to understand that when the thaw came after Stalin’s death, we really thought everything would change. No one could have imagined that it would all stagnate under Brezhnev and that many of the old repressions and punishments would come back. It was exciting to believe that we could change, that our generation would be the one to break the chains of Communism.” She shrugged, face clouded with old memories.