He was The Watcher Eternal.
He had Harmony.
What more could he want?
I too have spoken with the dead, he whispered in a voice no one could hear, and they tell me this life is a fine place to be.
He could want that; he could want life.
Gabriel Rush waited on the other side, his feet bringing him across the black tar of the road. It isn’t over, he tried to say but nothing came out. No warning for the last of them. No warning for the wraiths of St. Malachi’s. Only then did he understand. He was alone. The Watcher Eternal, on a street corner, alone. Bitter and ironic, that was the taste of Harmony.
Chapter Eighty-three
The ghost of the dead girl walked away from the hospital ward as the rain began to fall.
The medics had flapped and flustered, wanting to run their checks, their CT Scans and their Chem 7’s but she had brushed them off, like the survivor of an auto wreck on the Tappan Zee, she’d walked out of the ward, drinking in the twin aromas of ammonia and detergent. The caustic smells burned her eyes, but that didn’t matter. In the glass of a fire door she stared at herself, liking what she saw.
No wonder the little Indian boy enjoyed his woman. She was delicious. Her heart beat faster as she touched the soft skin around her eyes, trying it on for size, moving the tendon beneath as if her skin were stretched over a colony of worms.
“Come to me, my dear one, come find me and we’ll dance the final dance… I’ll be waiting where it all began. I’ll be waiting.”
The door swung closed behind her, in the distance the alarm sounded as another soul crashed. She walked away in her borrowed skirt to the music of death, her feet taking her towards the gabled roof of St. Malachi’s.
Chapter Eighty-four
A part of Gabriel wanted to grab up a broken stone from the roadside and hurl it at Stern’s shade, but what was the point? Where was the justice when a man could lose all he loved not once but twice?
Instead, he said a prayer for the dead man and went back to his empty apartment above the laundry just outside of Chinatown to sink down amongst the photographs of everything he had lost. It was strange, walking around the apartment, just how much of Ashley had snuck in to his life, simple things like shampoo in the bathroom, her ladyshave on the side of the tub, lipstick and gloss on the nightstand, underwear in the dirty linen. Even her handwriting on the shopping list stuck to the fridge. Little bits of her had found their way into all of his secret places, places that weren’t meant to be shared, even with loved ones. It wasn’t going to be a case of finding reminders of her for days or weeks or even months, things that were going to make him break down were going to be there forever, her essence was so deeply immersed in the four walls of his life that Gabriel was going to be running into the ghosts of her for as long as he could keep running, and even if time made him stronger, nothing could make him forget. And the ghosts? They might fade but they would never truly disappear.
They might be cast back in the reflections of the lingerie store window on 5th Avenue, or echo from the walls of the pancake place on West 48th. They might walk beside him through Prospect Park, slipping an ethereal hand into his, simply content to walk and watch the sun go down. They might tut quietly at the sight of a parent pulling at a child in the supermarket line or whistle at the 4th of July fireworks lighting the sky.
Aimee Mann suited his mood, so Gabriel rolled himself a cigarette and sat back with nothing but the music going on. It lasted less than two songs, then he felt it pulling at him, darkness on the edge of his consciousness, goading with the sweet voice of Ash…
“Come to me, my dear one, come find me and we’ll dance the final dance… I’ll be waiting where it all began. I’ll be waiting.”
“You win,” he said out loud. “I don’t have the strength.” And that was the truth, there was only so much strength inside any man and this one was stretched thin, but still, five minutes later Gabriel was standing on the sidewalk, steam venting from the grille at his feet. He mingled with the jaywalkers too impatient to wait for the Walk sign crossing into Canal Street and heading north, passed the discount jeans stores and the exotic deli’s, the windows full of fake watches and the cut-price electrics.
The city was awash with noise and scents, shrimps hissing on the hot plates, barkers calling out the daily news, the chorus of car horns playing the cross-town jam. Someone humming Springsteen’s Thunder Road beneath their breath. The war vet with his amputated leg resting on the sidewalk outside of the diner. All the familiar idiosyncrasies of his beloved Manhattan, and yet it was all so very different right then. It was as if he were seeing the world through new eyes; the eyes of an angel.
There was no blinding flash of light, no God-like clapping of thunderous noise, instead from fingertips to the roots of his hair, Gabriel felt a mild electrical tingling as if some primal untapped instinct was slowly waking. With it came a sense of calmness. Ease. Walking passed the huge plate glass window of Barnes & Noble he felt the tension begin to ebb from his tightly coiled muscles. And that was when he was hit by the betrayal:
Hanging by the neck from a streetlamp, a small black skinned boy, eyes eaten through by the insects swarming over his corpse. “Die Nigger Die!” had been sprayed across his small chest in red paint. It was difficult to read for the blood.
Gabriel reeled backwards, ears filled with laughing and jeering crescendo of chittering insect-voices. The sudden force of the movement had him staggering into the path of a briskly walking suit and briefcase and stumbling a few steps before his legs finally gave way beneath him.
The need to vomit clogged up in his throat but the horror was gone. There was no child hanging from the lamppost. He dragged himself up to his knees.
“Now you see what I see, live with what I live with, my little Indian Chief,” the angel hissed inside his head. “He died there, a month, a year ago, it doesn’t matter, and he’s always there for me. I’ll never forget him and neither will you…”
“Get. Out. Of. My. Head!” Gabriel hissed, slamming the heels of his hands into his temples. He knew people were staring at him hunched there on his knees, balled fists pressed into the sides of his skull, people walking along in the comfort of their nice, normal, mundane lives.
“Just another part of the freakshow, that’s what they think you are,” the Angel of Red taunted. “Another one of the inmates escaped the Asylum. Welcome to MY world.”
And suddenly the secrets from those mundane lives were humming inside Gabriel’s head, first as whispers:
“Yes, I think I love her.”
“Let’s make it real, let’s do it…”
“Fuck you, bitch!”
“I didn’t promise you heaven…”
“Whore.”
“Bastard.”
And then louder, secrets spilling in the voices of Manhattan until he was drowning in the city’s secret life.
“Let’s cut a deal, okay.” One hissed.
“This is my woman, nigger.” Another threatened, steel in its tone.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“Moron.”
“Fuckwit.”
“Get outta my face…”
“Jesus Christ, what does Moreno think he’s doing with that cunt? She’s young enough to be his granddaughter.”
“I said kiss my lilywhite ass…”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, honey…”
“I said don’t fuckin’ move or I’ll cut you up so bad…”
“She was pregnant…”
“White meat…”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“Pushed her down the stairs… I stood behind her and pushed… I pushed her…”
“I miss you, angel…”
“You fucked her? You fucking well fucked her? You fucker…”
Gabriel’s face twisted, the pain of three million lives swelling inside his brain, clamouring to get in deeper. Each voice with its own anguished tale to tell. Its own tragedies to whisper
straight into his soul: Abuse, molestations and muggings, love, death, needles and rinds, highs and lows, blockers and poppers, beatings and burglaries, alcohol and separation, divorce and custody battles, betrayal and forgiveness…
Every voice was a victim, every word an avenue into a street of pain. It took everything Gabriel had just to raise his head from the cracked sidewalk.
“Leave me alone,” he begged the angel inside him.
“Leave you alone,” it mocked. “But, my little Indian, why should I?”
“Please…” it was a whimper forced between clenched teeth.
“I haven’t even begun.”
The spider web of cracks broken through paving slab beneath his hands began, slowly, to leak colour. They bled like veins of mingled reds, deep red through rust to rose, and the residue leaking out into the street thick enough to actually be blood. As it bled across his fingers Gabriel felt a surge of hatred for the angel sharing his head, that surge feeding off the stolen memory of Ashley’s screams fading, her face kissing the softness of the carpet. Of her struggling desperately to rise, already undone by weakness, by the promise of nevermore, flowing through her veins… Trying to talk as the life leaked out of her… And for a second, a fragment of a second, Gabriel understood. Tasted the intensity of emotion burning through his soul, and understood everything the angel offered. It would have been easy, so easy to give himself over to it; he would have, but for the feathered angel of Mott Street, a starling whose wings dripped the serene blue of flight as it flittered over the newspaper vendor’s stall.
That glimpse of harmony was enough to jar Gabriel. Make him realise that the pure red anger singing through his veins wasn’t his own. In that icy moment of clarity the starling swooped from the air to the litter strewn gutter, the essence dripping from its wings shot through with streaks of black, as black as night itself. Gabriel watched it feed on the dead rat, the secret geography of death illuminated by the shifting dance of colours that bathed the starling’s body in light.
“Death,” the voice inside his head crooned. “The black, is as vital as dreaming.”
There were thoughts in Gabriel’s head, images, pictures and words that belonged to the angel that offered a chance at understanding what it already knew. The secrets.
The tide of Colours lapped at Gabriel’s body, like the rising tide threatening to bring down a lonely sandcastle. Gabriel watched it all, entranced by the harlequin Dance of Colour that was life, the greens and the golds, the blues, the spectrum so perfectly balanced that all feelings could co-exist, but not so entranced that he couldn’t sense the nearness of death.
It was like looking at the same old streets, the same old world, but seeing them with new eyes.
The Land of Coloured Glass.
Gabriel pushed himself to his feet, needing the support of the streetlight to keep him standing. People passed on all sides, carrying with them their own coats of many colours. The whole street was a brilliant, impossible canvas exploding to life all around him. But it was a thin canvas. A fragile one. Built of coloured glass. People with their own haloes clustered together according to their colourations as if some optical magnetism was at work, drawing like to like.
He stood look a man in a tidal wave of colour, being buffeted and bullied by ranks of grey shuffling by, a spray of yellow so vibrant it could have been a scattering of doubloons along Main Street. And every third or fourth wave, a jumble of pure randomness would wend its way past, revelling in the disparities of emotion and character. Gabriel simply soaked it up, mouthful after drunken mouthful, like a blind man cursed with the gift of sight.
From behind him, down the street, he heard a scream. And laughter.
The laughter taken up by the thing inside his head.
Around him, the street dissolved into a muddy wash of red. Amid the dissolution of colour a pregnant woman lay on the floor, clutching at her belly. She was sobbing, trying desperately to protect the baby inside her whilst a skeletally tall teenager blazing red like an inferno levelled kick after hate-filled kick at her. Then he was sprinting off towards the subway entrance with her bag in his hands.
It was all over so quickly. Yet nobody moved to help the woman until her attacker had disappeared down through the hole in the ground.
He smelled the sweet scent of cinnamon drifting out of a Starbucks doorway carrying with it the truth; life goes on…
Chapter Eighty-five
The Angel of Red stared at the twisting spire of St. Malachi’s as it rose up before her stolen feet. A great stone monster obsessed with the Immaculate Conception. Her nostrils flared, scenting the last of the witnesses on the wind. Back where it all began. The smile on her face spoke of the ecstasy shuddering through her body, each tremor a new, sheer delight, as phantom bullets slammed into her. She gasped her pleasure, as near to pure undiluted and erotically charged sex as this body had ever felt, reliving the death dance of Carlos Lamenzo not twenty feet from where she stood now.
A drunk sat huddled between the lines of graves, the synapses of his addled mind singing with the lies of the unholy communion blood wrapped protectively in his brown paper bag.
“Welcome to my world,” she crooned, laughing at the drunk as he struggled to stand. Her world was gradually filming over with a patina of red glass supple enough for each stem of grass to ripple with the caress of the choked inner city breeze. The failing light left the stars looking like dew-drops spattered on velvet and the old church like the little plastic castle at the bottom of a goldfish bowl. Around her the bushes and trees took on the haunting aspect of crucified scarecrows as the skin of red enveloped them, making each trunk, each branch into another skeletal limb. All around the churchyard branches sparkled against the halo of the twilight sun, catching and reflecting the whole spectrum of colours yet somehow radiating a pure blazing red strong enough to fill the whole city with its hate.
The church was all angles and pillars, windows pointing like accusing fingers at the darkening sky. The dressed stone had greyed with exhaust fumes and the tragedy of everyday life but still St. Malachi’s looked magnificent in its gothic splendour. Every angle so precise, roses carved into the body of the pillars, florets and coronets atop them. Two hundred and eighty feet to the stone cross capping the bellower and still St. Malachi’s was an anachronism dwarfed by skyscrapers of glass and steel that stretched five times her height. Out of place and out of time.
The Angel of Red smiled herself a hateful smile, captivated by the work of God, amused that it lay so utterly bereft of life; a playground of junkies, drunks and whores. She walked slowly, still adjusting to the quirks of her borrowed body, and placed her hands out flat on the cold stone as if feeling for a pulse. The old stones were as dead as their deity.
A shiver of pleasure shuddered through Ashley Powell’s body, the physical memory of a bullet bursting through Carlos Lamenzo’s spinal cord. Beneath her hands a film of resinous red glass melted over the stone. She lifted her hand higher. The sticky glass began to flow up the wall, trying to reach her fingers. Smiling, the angel began a slow spiderclimb up the face of the old church, one hand at a time, the glass film working like glue to hold her slight weight as she ventured higher. Every foot gained drew the veil of red glass higher until it began to obscure the beauty of the old religion with the malice of the new.
Manhattan spread out beneath her eyes, grey and labyrinthine like so many twists and turns of the laboratory maze, all leading back to St. Malachi’s. Did they know this when they built the old church? That it bisected all angles of the city so equilaterally? The streets could have been brightly coloured ribbons where neon signs and car headlights joined with the secret underlife of colours. Her fingers dug through the safety of the glass film into the hardness of the wall, flaking stone.
Where to look? Where was her little Indian boy?
The Angel of Red’s nostrils flared, trying to catch Gabriel Rush’s scent on the swirling winds. He was out there… close…
A flurry of
wind gusted around her, curling around the church’s conical spire, plucking at her clothes like a demanding child as she scuttled upwards, reaching for the small stone cross that marked the summit. With all the irony of an angelic rodeo rider, the glass angel straddled the cross as if it was some beast waiting to be tamed. From its perch up on the cross the mesh of multi-coloured lines dissecting the city might have been some kind of intricate electrical diagram, wires and earths connecting each and every home and life down there. But the angel knew them for what they were, the lullaby of life, harmony and tranquillity, hatred and vengeance, sung by the streets on a failing winter night.
The angel closed her eyes, savouring the moment, the snatches of the song of life, even as she sensed him. The one white light in the city. The one light that shone brighter than the rest. She didn’t need to open her eyes to see him. Gabriel Rush was this one dazzling white nimbus cutting through the falling night like a blade cleaving through Manhattan’s idiot heart.
The angel licked a dry tongue across Ashley’s sandpaper lips, following the gossamer strands of light with its eyes, tracing them from the sea of souls all the way back to the doors of St. Malachi’s.
“Come to me, beauty.” She crooned in her stolen voice.
Chapter Eighty-six
“Get out of my head,” Gabriel begged, clutching at his temples in an attempt to drive the demons out of his skull.
He was staggering down the sidewalk like a drunk, stumbling into things, a woman sluicing down the steps of her tenement block with a hose, a Popeye-like man overloaded with one litre Coke bottles on his way to the recycling bins, a three-legged dog and one of the war veterans on his board panhandling outside a downtown music store. They just pushed him away, sent him staggering further down the street no different from any other drunk or crazy. No one stopped to help him, but why would they? All they saw was a lunatic clutching at his temples, almost pulling his hair out and babbling about voices inside his head.
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