Last Angel

by Savile, Steve

  On the corner of Cicero, Gabriel feel to his knees, driven down by the sheer assault of voices, personalities opening themselves up to him. Battered on every side by the hopes and dreams of Manhattan as they coiled about him, blanketed him with a terrible, bleak desperation that smothered him. He didn’t have the strength to shut them out, all of their pains and petty thoughts drowning his own personality beneath their crude waves of passion. The maelstrom of emotions threatened to overwhelm him completely if he couldn’t throw up some form of defence against the consciousness of everyone around him. Barricade his soul from all of the hatred humming in the air. Barricade it from the underworld of appetite and hunger that made the real one turn.

  The assault was so fierce he barely noticed the rest of the world, the solid, tangible world, as it passed by the corner of his dilated eye. Gabriel groped out, looking for something to support him as he struggled to stand again. His hand closed on a restless coil of shifting light. The thing was like some huge snake… no, an umbilical cord, stretching impossibly back to the earth mother. His head span with wonderment whilst his eyes feasted on the snake of life in his hands, awed, hungry, and afraid as to why the miracles were coming apart.

  The pains of Manhattan were nothing next to the hatred spiralling inside Gabriel. It was as if a red mist had smothered his eyes. The world was coming undone and the hatred blazing inside him was just one small way in which the nuts and bolts of humanity were loosening. He cast about desperately looking for something to vent that hatred on, something to batter until the agony in his fists was loud enough to silence the voices crying out in his head. Something to punch, to hit, to kick, with all of the anger, all of the hate, that was knotted up inside him until it bled out of him. Until it dripped red on the sidewalk. Until it hardened like rust on the walls. Until it seeped into the very fabric of the city itself…

  The auras of people treading the drab, grey streets where the snow had melted to slush held firm for the moment, but for how much longer? How long would it take for all of those hatreds to seep into the streets and the buildings? How much longer would it take to have fissures cracking through the skyscrapers, red mouths opening in the sides of Wall Street and Broadway with sharp-edged teeth ready to eat –

  Gabriel shook his head, trying to force the alien thoughts out and somehow reign down on the tidal swell of emotions churning around inside him. “The madness will pass,” he whispered, framing Ashley’s face in his Mind’s Eye. If he could only shut it out, or isolate it, he would be okay. In response:

  “Look upward, my little Hiawatha…” the angel within, mocked.

  Across the street, back where it all began, where Gabriel had stumbled onto a miracle in the guise of a child killer being gunned down by New York’s finest, towered the brooding edifice of St. Malachi’s.

  “I hate you.”

  The church’s maudlin spire drew his traitorous eyes. It was like gazing upon a finely cut chalice and seeing his own reflection manufactured a thousand thousand times in its cuts and angles, and in each reflection his eyes were accusing, the darkness within them whispering his fear.

  “I’ve killed you once,” he breathed aloud, trying to mask his own voice clamouring inside his mind, the one obsessed with the truth: “I’m scared… I don’t want to die…”

  “Oh, have you? I don’t feel very dead…”

  Gabriel made it as far as the white line cutting through the road before the relentless waves of hatred coming off the old church stopped him in his tracks. They were physical. As physical as any gale. Strong enough to drive him back a staggered step.

  “Frightened of me?” he hissed between clenched teeth, pushing him on even as the skin stretched taut across his cheeks and the muscles in his face began to twitch and vibrate, coming alive like maggots beneath the thin reality of his flesh. With each step it felt as if his eyes would rupture and ooze blind jelly, the winds of hate like a knife delivering one lethal wound after another. And then, suddenly, the knives were real. The huge stained glass windows beneath the spire shattered outwards as if mere glass couldn’t contain all of the hatred that was bottled up within those four walls. Splinters of multi-coloured glass sprayed out across the street, cutting into him. Gabriel turned his face away from the ragged glass as it rained down on him. Each splinter and shard biting where it fell.

  When Gabriel looked back, a film of red glass had sealed the wound in St. Malachi’s facade. He walked through the litter of broken glass that lay ignored and glittering on the floor, his gaze raised to the fire blazing redly where the cross should have been.

  The vaulted roof and the stretching spire of blood red glass caught the darkness of the sun and the night together and threw it back at the sky. A glass tower coruscating against a scarlet sky. A magnificent red beacon to all of the evils mankind’s twisted minds could imagine.

  “How do you kill an angel?”

  Inside the heart of the church somewhere, a crack, like timbers breaking.

  The corpse of a woman came staggering through the bronze doors of the nave, smoke chasing after her. Her thick winter coat crackled and burned, the sparks igniting her long dark hair even as she swatted at her head trying to beat the flames out. Gabriel couldn’t move; tried to tell himself she was dead already. That there was nothing he could do. She opened her mouth to scream but no sounds made it out of the mess that was her throat. Wisps of smoke curled around her lips. Lingered on her teeth as if they wanted one last kiss, one last nibble before the said goodbye.

  It took Gabriel a moment to realise there were no flames burning away in the building behind her and understand that it was the intimate glass skin that hugged her body like cellophane that had ignited, that it was the very hate of the woman herself that consumed her. That she truly burned with hatred.

  She fell to her knees, flame-wreathed arms beating ineffectually at her sides as the fire ate her once-pretty face, her hands like fiery batons conducting her own death until she pitched forward. Her husk lay smouldering on the sidewalk until it had burned out. Even with the flames gone, the stench of charred flesh clung to the air with its taint.

  Gabriel stood there, mesmerised by the human torch, the angel’s last taunting question ringing in his ears…

  How do you kill an angel?

  Chapter Eighty-seven

  Silver bullet? Crucifix? A stake through the heart?

  All of the legends invented by the old horror movies ran through his mind as he stepped into the nave. It was as if he had walked into a meat locker; sub zero air frosting on the stone floor, the perfect rime broken only by the pale ghosts of the dead woman’s footsteps where they staggered up the aisle. He scratched at the bird tattooed on his chest. Nothing had changed. Despite all of the miracles, all of the impossibilities that had been spawned and span away crazily after that first bullet took Carlos Lamenzo’s life, nothing inside this old stone relic had changed. The cool vault of the old church still smelled of myrrh and spikenard and the slightly sweet aroma of burning votive candles. Shadows painted the holy trinity on the floor.

  Gabriel walked slowly down the aisle, walking in the dead woman’s footsteps passed the guttering candles lined up against the wall, drawn towards the narthex, by the memory of —

  Seeing him rise, the Resurrection Man pull himself to his feet, the circle of men gathered in the church fired. Nine guns. Nine new deaths struck him: upper thigh, groin, abdomen, cheek, spleen, lungs, heart and arm. The boy in the middle danced to the push and shove of the bullets but somehow managed to go on living and haul himself to his feet. Another gun fired again, launching a second volley of fire. Two shots took him in the chest, one ploughed through his temple, another into his leg, four went wide.

  “Look at me,” the angel on the floor said as it drew itself erect… It reached out to take the Resurrection Man by the hand… “A life for a life… I’ve waited a long time, do you want to live?”

  “Do I want to?” the boy, bleeding from the wounds driven into his corpse, as
ked himself. There was only one answer: “Yes…”

  — No Face Jesus stepping down from the crucifix above the altar and breathing life into Carlos Lamenzo’s corpse.

  The sun’s light had faded some of the wound left in the crucifixion scene by the wooden Jesus’ fall from grace but the gash left behind was still raw, as if someone had stolen the moon from the sky and tried to colour in the hole with a black crayon. Another testament to the reality of the miracle. They really had seen a dead man walk that day.

  It was a lie, of course, to pretend that nothing had changed. There was no Father D’Angelo leaning against the sanctuary rail mumbling a useless prayer as Gabriel walked down the aisle. The people had changed: Francesca, Sam, Ashley.

  Gabriel stepped over the low railing and reached for the door to the bellower. His hands twitched uselessly for want of some kind of weapon, the comfort of a talisman, useless or not, something outside of him, solid and real, that he could draw strength from. As it was, he was alone as he began the long climb towards death. Outside, it was raining. The raindrops loud on the rooftop.

  “Come to me, my little Indian… I want to taste your soul.”

  Chapter Eighty-eight

  Gabriel took a deep breath, the fingers of his right hand clawing at the itchy raven tattooed on his chest. The edges of the painted bird burned. His skin crawled. The combination of sensations made it feel as if the black bird were struggling to fly free of his body, hungry for a life of its own.

  He felt sickness rising in his craw.

  It wasn’t the claustrophobic stairway or the height. It was fear. Fear like an illness sweeping through his system. He felt lightheaded, dizzy. Part of him felt less real somehow. As if he had already passed over into the land of dead souls. His body was on the edge of betraying him as he reached out for the brass handle that would open the timber door to the church roof. He was shaking. The stone steps beneath his feet gently rocking like the sea lapping at the shore, threatening to tip him all the way back down to earth.

  He wasn’t ready but it didn’t matter, nothing he could have done would have been able to prepare him for what waited on the other side of the door.

  Chapter Eighty-nine

  Ashley stood on the watershed of the gently gabled roof, a ghost framed by the too bright streetlights and the tired moon. She could have been an angel but for the blue-black bruises around her eyes and the strangulation wounds around her neck. She looked as if she’d been beaten or hadn’t slept in days. Her hair dripped water into her eyes. She stood there, a dead girl crying rain as she held her hands out to him.

  “Help me, Gabriel,” she said. The wind played with her soaked skirt, pressing the thin floral print material up against her legs, building an illusion as it flowed around her. She looked helpless… innocent in a way she never had…

  Gabriel picked at his chest, seeking some kind of reassurance from the wise bird, but the tattooed raven was real and it told him one thing: eyes lie.

  Still, he couldn’t find the words in him to deny the hope that somehow it could be her.

  Worm Pipe, the thought was in his head but he didn’t know if it was his own… So many years ago Wind Runner had sat him on his knee before the campfire and woven the legend of Worm Pipe, the husband who, so much in love with his new bride that he couldn’t let her die, travelled to the Ghost Lodge in the Land of Dead Souls and begged for her life from his ancestors ghosts. He brought her back… But that was just a story… There was no Ghost Lodge… No Sky River… No Earth Mother… They were all stories, just like Napi, the First Father…

  “Ash,” Gabriel breathed, trying to grasp the truth somewhere from within the need to believe the miracle standing before him. “I thought… I thought.” He thought he had seen her die, through her own eyes and then, twisted about, through the eyes of her killer, but how could he say that?

  Ashley made an uncertain step towards him.

  She had something in her hand. It took him a moment to realise what it was: a wilted rose. It was as if she had reached out and slammed her fist, dead flower and all, into his gut. He staggered back beneath the weight of the vision of another girl with a rose —

  A sad faced girl alone in a street corner bar, drinking her day away. Between her fingers she twirled a flawed rose. Delicate white petals flaunting their imperfection; a single red tear weeping through the silk weave. There was something desperate in the way her long, sculptured fingernails pinched the fake stem. Her gaze drifted out of the window, to the lamppost across the wide street, some ghost of her past leaning against it, watching her.

  Through the lens she looked less an angel, more a dead dreamer only anchored to this earth by the weight of her thoughts.

  — Gabriel had put flowers on her grave the day he’d visited Sam.

  He shook his head. “No,” it was barely a word. A denial. He was reaching inside his jacket for the snub-nosed .38, not caring that it wasn’t loaded with silver bullets, that he had no prayer for the dying angel. It felt heavy in his hand, but not heavy enough. How heavy should a life be? Heavier than a gun, surely. Heavier than the bullet that kills. “You’re not Ashley…” was all he said as he levelled the pistol’s hungry black eye on the body of his love.

  He couldn’t hold his aim. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. Holding a gun on the woman he loved. His finger tightened around the trigger but the gun refused to hold still, to keep its aim.

  He heard her laughing inside his head and was sure that he had finally slipped into the mouth of madness.

  Her eyes are empty, he told himself, her eyes are empty… It’s not her, not my Ash…

  Gabriel wanted to believe he saw a flicker of Ashley in those eyes, but whilst she might have spoken with Ashley’s voice, the difference was in her eyes. Ashley was gone. Still, he wanted it to be Ashley as he brought the .38 back up to lock eyes with his dead lover. Wanted her to understand, to know what it cost to pull the trigger.

  “I won’t forget to put roses on your grave,” he whispered, closing his eyes as he squeezed the trigger. He couldn’t bear to see.

  The sound of the gunshot was deafening.

  And after it, for a long second, there was only the sound of the rain drumming on the old church’s roof.

  Rain.

  And inside:

  Pain.

  Chapter Ninety

  Gabriel opened his eyes to see —

  …a sad-faced man with tired raven-black hair that touched his shoulders aiming a gun at him… The man’s almost red skin was wet with the rain… the scar beneath his left eye twitching to the tiny tremors beneath his cheek… his hand was shaking…the gun came up again… the black eye of the barrel wider and blacker than the doorway gaping behind this would-be killer…

  He tried desperately to move his arms, his legs, but they refused… he watched helplessly as three more bullets hit, one steeling the sight from his eyes as it exploded in the tissue behind the socket, bathing the world in red… blood…one shattering his knee, betraying his balance on the rain-slick roof… the last one slamming into his chest… pushing him back…too far… he felt the world begin to tilt…the roof beneath his feet treacherous, like glass…

  “How Do you kill an angel,” a voice inside his head mocked, taking all the burning, all the pain… absorbing it… living through it… but there was something else under it… another emotion…stronger than all the hate in the world… —

  It came for him then, scrambling across the treacherous rooftop, claws hungry for his heart. There was nothing of Ashley in it. The thing scrabbling across the roof was pure beast.

  “You don’t,” Gabriel said aloud, pulling himself back before the Angel of Red’s fear overwhelmed him. “Angels fall.” He fired again, the last bullet. This time he didn’t aim at the angel in Ashley’s skin, but at the ground beneath her feet. The tile fractured. It very nearly didn’t break but the Angel’s weight was too much. Ashley teetered dangerously as the roof betrayed her. Her hand clawed helplessly at
the air, trying to grab something to hold on to as another tile broke. And one next to it. They tumbled like dominoes as the Angel flapped around trying to save itself. But there was no salvation to be found on a church roof in the dark heart of winter. Only death.

  “We’re not the same,” Gabriel said softly, in answer to all of the taunts the Angel had planted in his head. “We’re not even similar…”

  In one last desperate lunge of anger, it threw itself at Gabriel, fingernails so close to raking across his chest, stinging blood. The sound of his blood, his heart, beat loud in its ears as the Angel fell to the roof on all fours, snapping its jaws and snarling like some animal gone feral.

  Gabriel didn’t so much as flinch. “Kill me then,” he whispered, thinking of Frankie, Sam, Ash. Everything he had lost. He lowered the gun to his side, waiting, praying silently for the death blow that would bring them all together…

  In the bellower high above, the old bells began to peel with a multitude of voices, heavenly and angelic, desperate and demonic. With each chime another tile shattered like glass beneath the falling Angel’s weight.

  It understood. Next to the hunger, the need to silence the last witness, there was real fear in Ashley’s ruined eyes. There was a crack. Something deep and terminal breaking within the roof’s timbers.

  “Do you want to live?” it hissed inside Gabriel’s head as if it hadn’t heard him.

  “No,” Gabriel said simply, holding the Angels’ gaze as its face blurred into those of his friends, a gallery of guilt owned by one man… Bill Stern, Jay Bogdanovich, Seth Lawson, Al Culpepper, Jackson Carlisle, a sad-faced Celine – Charlotte – Annuci, the flower girl with her stained rose, Father Joe on a mattress in a bedsit, and the last mask, the one that lingered, refusing to fade, Ashley. The future… “I’ve already lost everything worth living for…”