by Cliff Hicks
It was somewhere in the middle of the conversation that Jake realized he could see Bob, who was intangible, even though Jake was not. Apparently he had the ability to see the celestial on Earth whether he was tangible or not. The only real differences were that Bob was ever so marginally transparent, and that Bob had a slight glow around him. The ghost had the same almost imperceptible glow as well, and Jake realized that was a marker of a celestial presence, rather than a terrestrial presence. Eventually, Bob seemed to be growing impatient with the newly deceased spirit, grabbing him by the wrist, pulling him over as he started to walk back to Jake.
“Look, Jake, I would love to hang around and chat with you all day, believe me, but I have to drag this yahoo up to Heaven after we do a couple more pick ups. Still, we should definitely hang out,” Bob said as he phased back into tangibility. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a small pad and a pencil, scrawling an address on the back of it, before tearing the top sheet off, holding it out to Jake. “It’s nice having someone to talk to who isn’t concerned with how many souls they have to cart around, or how they never get anyone interesting to talk to. Not that we generally do anyway…”
Jake took the sheet of paper from Bob’s hand and read it out loud. “‘San Francisco, Fillmore Theater, main hall, back right balcony, unscrew table top from base.’ What’s this?”
“So, we Cherubim, occasionally we like to get together and have drinks or something on Earth. Consider it our little paid time off,” Bob said in a stage whisper voice, a wry smile on his lips. It seemed the Cherubim had dirtly little secrets of their own to hide. “Obviously Heaven doesn’t want us partying in groups on Earth, because that would be bad for the moral of the rest of the angels, or some nonsense like that. So we figured out a little drop spot. What you do is you sneak in there after the theater’s closed, unscrew the table top and you’ll find a little hollow, and there’s one of those metal film jars that slots right in there. We leave notes to and for one another there. You want to get a hold of me, you leave a note in there marked ‘To Bob’ at the top, and it’ll stay there until I take it out. I check it more than any of the other angels, but there’s a couple of other guys who check it pretty regularly, so just sign it ‘J’ and I’ll know it’s you. That way if you want to meet up, we can.”
“You’re a pretty solid guy for an angel, Bob,” Jake said with a smile. He folded up the piece of paper and tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll try and memorize this so I’m not carting around the sheet of paper for too long.”
“Not every angel’s a lunatic, Jake…” Bob said as he phased back into intangibility. “Just most of them.” He turned to look at the ghost, who’d been watching the conversation with confusion. “Come on, Harold, it’s time to go.”
The ghost named Harold started to stutter, but before he could get a word out, Bob and Harold had faded and disappeared. Jake scolded himself for not thinking to ask how the Cherubim moved around on Earth without the jarring doors of light, but he took out the piece of paper with a smile. He would have something to ask him about when they had drinks for the first time.
Jake laughed privately. All it had taken was dying, going to Heaven and breaking out to make a new friend. (Good friends were so very hard to find.)
* * * * *
The idea of searching Jake’s belongings had seemed like a good idea at first, but after a few hours the three angels were about to lose their minds. The halls were seemingly endless, with shelving up to the ceilings, twenty feet up into the air, running down farther than the eye could see. There were boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes. Worse still, the organizational system was perhaps the most useless thing ever placed on Heaven or Earth. Everything was filed in the order in which it came in, which meant each box was just placed one atop another until it hit the next deck, then the ceiling, at which point another column was started and the process was begun all over again. No rhyme or reason, just purely in order of appearance. And being that people were dying remarkably quickly, there were a lot of boxes to have to scan through. It also didn’t help that people took varying times to get through the lines and to the point where they turned in their earthly possessions, so when someone died was completely irrelevant to when they were placing their things into the bin somewhere down the line. It was, in the nicest of terms, a total mess.
Being optimistic, the angels had talked to one of the people filing boxes away, hoping they would have some idea of how to best find Jake Altford’s things. Of course, the reply given was “Why would anyone want to do that?” In fact, it seemed odd that anyone would want to find any earthly things, and when the questions started coming their way, the three angels politely excused themselves and started searching on their own.
So rarely were people looking for things in lockup, and so much additional manpower would have been needed to make them easily locatable, that Heaven had apparently given up on the idea of keeping any kinds of records about what order things were placed when and whose they were. It was a miracle in itself that the boxes at least had peoples names written on the side in glowing gold text. (There was a picture of them there, too, but that wasn’t always helpful.) Most of the people carrying the boxes to the stacks looked as though they would have been just as content to be dumping everything into a very large hole in the ground somewhere, assuming they could find a big enough hole in Heaven.
And so the three angels combed through mile after unbearable mile of boxes, trying desperately to find Jake Altford’s things. Time had no real meaning in Heaven, but James felt like he was starting to know exactly how Jake must have felt when put through the daily rituals they’d confined him to. And James had to admit to himself that it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing. It wasn’t horrible so much as… tedious. Frustrating. The sense that you were out of place, a nail that stuck out in need of hammering.
The other angels were starting to feel it as well. Even Randall had been softening up a little. Since they’d left the quarters, he’d seemed more and more directionless, as if this change in his routine had taken the wind from his sails. Where as Randall had been a man of purpose inside the quarters, the leader of five angels (who never really took him all that serious to begin with) in charge of keeping a few dozen souls in quarters and manageable, now he seemed downright mopey.
At first James suspected that Randall was letting him take a more active hand simply because Randall had been in those quarters for quite some time, and didn’t really know much about the rest of Heaven, but now he was starting to think that Randall was starting to question their whole purpose. It was a dangerous thing indeed, or it would’ve been, if James hadn’t been feeling the same way himself.
Shelly, on the other hand, was more active than he could recall her being in ages. It was as if the unknown had awakened something in her, and she was enjoying the pursuit as if it were an adventure, a game she didn’t really want to end and desperately wanted to keep playing. She had smiled more since they’d been on the hunt than James could ever recall her doing inside quarters.
The five angels hadn’t really known each other before they’d been assigned to quarters together, given a block of their own to watch. They didn’t really know much about each other now, actually, as they always found other things to talk about, be it the quarters next to theirs, the latest Lucifer spotting from Earth, which of the Archangels had been seen in the hallways as of late… and if there wasn’t a topic handy for them to make chitchat about, they hadn’t really talked at all.
(‘Silence is always harmonious,’ he remembered some smug angel saying.)
They were there to do a job, not chitchat. They quietly went about their work, paid attention to their charges (or had pretended to, at least) and followed orders. And that was how they had been most of the time they were in the block.
It was a change James had been glad to see fade away. (He had always liked talking to people when he was alive.) He felt like the further they got from the quarters, the more they were coming i
nto focus with who they used to be, or who they wanted to be. Despite his dragging of feet, Randall was at least talking with them, rather than to them. As they wandered down the hallways of white boxes on white shelving, Randall was griping about the lack of organization and structure the place had, but he was still pleased it wasn’t their job.
“I mean,” Randall started, “who thinks of carting boxes around all day as their idea Heaven anyway?”
“Someone who wants to feel useful,” Shelly said, “although I don’t really see the use in keeping all of this stuff. It’s not like they’re going to want it back now, are they?”
Randall stopped a moment, and the other two walked a few paces past him before stopping to look back at him. He was silent for a moment then spoke with a slightly cautionary tone. “What…” he started then stopped before starting again. “What if Heaven’s really just putting people in places to put them in places? What if it isn’t what they want to be doing but Heaven just needs a particular job filled, so they’re slotted into that, and told it must be what their idea of Heaven is? I mean, wouldn’t people just accept that since it’s what Heaven told them, it must be true?”
Shelly walked back to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Randall…”
He shook his head. “No, I mean it, Shelly… I didn’t really want to be in charge when I got to Heaven. I… I saw a Runner when I was in the early stages of the lines, and I … I watched the Taggers tear him to shreds and send him back to where he’d been, and I realized that while I didn’t know what I wanted out of Heaven, I didn’t want that. So I acted all confident, like I enjoyed being in charge of people, and in charge of situations, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about Taggers ever coming after me.” The senior angel was definitely shaken. “But when you get right down to it, I’m not that different from this guy we’re chasing. I didn’t fit in, so I did what I had to, to survive…”
Shelly smiled at him and then wrapped her arms around him, giving him a reassuring hug. “That just means you’re still human, under that big commanding façade you try and push on everyone, and that’s okay.” They held onto each other for a minute or so before she pulled back, and some of the harshness had left Randall’s face.
“Thanks Shelly. I think I was starting to lose it.”
“Well, pull yourself together,” she said with a laugh, and a shake of her head. “We need to find this guy and get him back into our quarters before they realize that he’s not in there and neither are we.”
James had kept walking down the row a bit, but had stopped, turning to call to them. “I found it!” He slid one of the ladders on rollers over to the column of boxes and climbed up the ladder to grab a box near the very top. (He did, however, stop for a second to look at the front of the box, at Jake’s picture, and laugh. Why in Heaven did they have that as a picture for him?) He had to hold the two boxes on top of it steady as he struggled to pull Jake’s box out from the mess. He slowly moved down the ladder with the box in tow as the other two angels moved over to join him. “Let’s see what you have in here, Mr. Altford. Some clue about what made you into this grand master escape artist.”
Randall pulled the top off the box and the three angels were surprised at how little was actually inside. Shoes, socks (with a bit torn off one of them), pants, shirt, boxers, wallet, some loose bills… but Shelly paused as she moved the socks aside and heard the sound of a small object rustling. She pushed the cloth aside and her fingers curled around something small and metallic.
“Guys, I think I found what we’re looking for,” she said as she held up the engagement ring. “This is a definite sign of a big change in his life.”
Randall frowned a bit. “It’s an engagement ring. So?”
James rifled through the box quickly then looked at the ring with the other two. “Ah, but you’re missing a few key details, Randall. The important one is that it isn’t inside of a box.”
He cocked his head to look at James curiously. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
The burlier of the two male angels let a slight smile crack on his face. “Well, if it were inside of a box, it would mean he was going to propose to someone. But it’s not in a box, which means…”
“Which means he was taking it back from someone,” Shelly said in a quiet whisper. “Oh god. He was taking it back from his fiancée. His ex fiancée I guess.”
“And it was still in his pocket,” James said. “Which means he had just gotten it back from her and hadn’t had time to sell it back, or even put it someplace in his home. God, he must have just found out and killed himself right afterwards.”
Randall shook his head as he put the lid back on the box. “No, I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem the type, even with all that.”
“You can never tell who’s the type to commit suicide, Randall,” Shelly said. “It’s just like you can’t tell who is the type to try and break out.”
He started carting the box back up the ladder. “I bet we could’ve if we’d paid more attention, but we were caught up in just going through the motions like everyone else. No, I don’t think he killed himself. Plus there’s no weapon in here. If he had shot himself or something, that weapon would be in here, along with everything else. No, I think maybe she broke it off and maybe he got careless or something and got into an accident, and that’s why he had the ring still on him.”
He pushed the box back into the place that James had taken it down from. “And that very much sounds like unfinished business to me. It sounds like the kind of thing where he would want to go back and see what kind of impact his death had had on her. And that means he might have tried to go back to Earth.”
Shelly looked up at him with shock as he descended the ladder. “He couldn’t get back to Earth! How would he?”
James handed her the ring. They had kept it, for whatever reason. “Shelly, you need to stop thinking about what this guy can’t do, because apparently that’s not much. He broke out of quarters, something I’ve certainly never heard of anyone doing before. He wandered past security and he didn’t stand out. Most runners, they’re caught right away because…” he laughed softly, “well, because they’re running. Our guy wasn’t running. In fact, he was clear of head enough to bluff his way past a pair of guards and convince them he was their superior officer. I don’t know that I would have thought of that, and I’m a lot more familiar with wandering around Heaven than Jake is. At this point, if you told me he had grabbed one of the Archangels, beaten him up and forced the angel to take him up to meet God personally… let’s just say I wouldn’t put it past him.
“This Jake Altford is smarter than we gave him credit for. He’s thinking, he’s planning, he’s doing all of this with some degree of forethought. He figured out right from the start that if he stood out, people were going to notice him, so he didn’t. Remember, not one person we talked to other than those halfwit guards even remember seeing the guy.”
“So?” Randall asked.
Shelly shook her head. “Don’t you see? He’s blending in, trying not to get noticed so that he can disappear. By now, I bet he’s not only on Earth, I bet he’s already got his next step figured out, God only knows what that is, and we’re going to have to start getting caught up to him. I imagine he’s probably been and gone from his ex fiancée and has moved onto whatever he’s going to do next. This guy is not the same guy they brought up to Heaven. Whoever he was on Earth, he is not that guy anymore.”
Randall took the ring from Shelly as he nodded. “That doesn’t mean he might not have left some indication of where he was going. Hell, he might have even tried to haunt her or something, for dumping him. Maybe he’s just standing around watching her, but I somehow doubt we’ll get that lucky.”
Shelly nodded. “We should be so lucky. So… uh… that means we have to go back to Earth.” She stared at both of them, worry lines creasing on her face. “How do we do that exactly?”
Randall sighed softly. “No idea.”
Ja
mes waved his hand dismissively. “Follow me. Remember, I had to do this for a while. I know how to get down to Earth.”
Randall laughed bitterly. “Finally, some good news for a change. Maybe luck is finally starting to turn in our direction.”
* * * * *
“What the fuck do you mean, you ‘lost one?’” an angel named Carlos shouted. He was sizable and intimidating and clearly not happy. He was shaking a finger at Terence, who was trying to shrink down to invisibility with no success. “How the Hell do you lose a soul? There’s one door! One single door! No other way in or out! That means he had to walk right past you to get out, and somebody had to have seen it!”
“Er, yes, well,” Terence stuttered, trying to get a word in edgewise. Carlos was their weekly report officer, and when he had arrived to get their weekly report, he’d noticed that Terence had been acting rather strangely. When pressed, the bookish angel had cracked like an eggshell and admitted that one of their flock had gone missing.
Things had pretty much been in steady decline since that point.
“So you let a soul just walk past you and out? Did he just say ‘Don’t worry, amigo. I’m just going out for a stroll and I promise I won’t be long?’ And where the Hell are the other angels? I see Byron’s over there teaching pottery or whatever, but I don’t see Randall, Shelly or James. What, did he take them hostage on his way out? And why the Hell am I just hearing about it now? Why wasn’t the alarm sounded, the Taggers sent out and this little shit dragged back to quarters?” Carlos had a loud voice and it was only getting louder by the second, as the large angel was starting to border on hysterical. Terence wouldn’t have been surprised to see him foaming at the mouth at this point.
“Now Carlos, try and stay calm…”
“Calm?! I’ll show you calm, you nitwit! I’ve never heard of anyone escaping out of the quarters, and of course you five screwups have to be the ones to do it, and on my watch!” He was pacing back and forth while Terence watched him, slouching into his chair, wishing he could just disappear. “I’m not taking the fall for you chuckleheads. You’re going to give me a full report on what happened and I’m going to go to the Taggers on overwatch and let them figure out what to do about it. Then I may pay a visit to our superior officer about your gross negligence. Me, I hope they give you idiots the worst detail they can imagine, and hopefully they won’t make me watch quarters because of your screwups.”