Last Angel

by Savile, Steve

  A splinter. Another crack. A scream of wood.

  The Angel’s fingers clawed at the collapsing roof. The feral hunger that had immolated in its eyes a moment before dulled, and a deep blue-green sea swelled in its place as the timbers and tiles beneath it finally sundered and fell inwards. Ashley’s hand came up, reaching out, and then she was gone, torn away by the fall.

  Gabriel closed his eyes. It was over. Where his story started, it ended, full circle. He wanted to cry but there were no tears left inside, only emptiness where so many people had been.

  Chapter Ninety-one

  The tolling of the bells slowed and became funereal, playing out a song of mourning.

  With each lonely chime a shifting, ghostly figure began to take shape within the sanctuary of St. Malachi’s, each born of a colour, each part of a brilliant, impossible, glassy rainbow of life conjured to circle the dead body on the floor.

  An ageless body, an angel to some, wreathed in white, knelt by the corpse of its fallen brother, its glassy circlet of thorns weeping slow red tears down its forehead. “Welcome home, my son,” The Father of All Colours whispered, its voice weighed down by infinite sadness as the dissolution set in.

  The Sacred Dance… the miracle of life contained within human flesh. The Secret Life of Colours…

  The Angel of Red twisted on the floor, struggling to shed Ashley’s dead flesh… The girl’s neck was broken and hung sickly. First with weak fingers, then gradually gaining strength, it opened the clotted muscle onto the cage of white bone beneath the flesh, and then like some grotesque butterfly the Angel began the screaming agony of its rebirth, coming out from the skin, breaking the cage bone by bone, taking Ashley off just as easily it had Lamenzo, but there was nowhere else to go this time when the Angel stepped out of the corpse. No body that hungered for life. It looked up, gasping for breath like some newborn, at the hole in the roof and the man who didn’t want to live, at the rubble strewn about the church floor, the destruction marked by slabs of masonry and broken tile, and back at its own kind. It called out. It yearned. But there was no hate, no desire, strong enough for it to answer. No hunger for life for it to fulfil. It was over.

  “I’m home,” the Angel of Red breathed into the sanctuary of the church as the other colours silently made a place for him around the broken body. From its tongue, the words sounded like a curse. A sheen of blood clung with lover’s intimacy to the Angel’s true form, its wings of glass slowly unfurling from the wash of blood that matted them against its back.

  Epilogue

  Gabriel Rush turned the music off and sank back into one of the worn-out loungers in Wind Runner’s trailer. The bars of the electric fire glowed a steady orange, radiating heat.

  He had tried but he hadn’t been able to face the world with its questions and its need to know, to understand. How could he begin to explain the miracles of angels and serial killers to a sane, rational world so hungry to blame Bill Stern? The Trinity Killer? A cop gone bad, they whispered, killing his own. Driven to it. Driven to the edge. The Reservation had been a refuge, a place to hide. But it wasn’t just that. Not if he was being honest with himself.

  The legend of Worm Pipe clung to his feverish thoughts like a leech sucking the very lifeblood out of him.

  Going into the Land of Dead Souls to bring a dead wife back… a dead son… a lover, the promise of a future…

  “It isn’t over,” he whispered into the quiet room. With the music gone, the only sound in the room was that of the rain breaking on the trailer’s roof. Christmas Day was twenty hours old. On the coffee table Photostats of the Trinity Killer’s victims lay face up, so many dead, accusing eyes that wouldn’t stop looking at him.

  There was so much blood staining his hands, so many lives. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking that he might have saved at least one of them if only he’d done something different, sooner…

  Celine’s blind eyes stared at the ceiling. She had her fake rose in her hand. The mark of the Trinity on her cheek. He’d drawn a red crayon ‘Z’ across her face: case closed. His own guilt kept him looking at the women rendered in memories and celluloid.

  The television flickered blue ghosts about the trailer.

  In one trembling hand he held his old .38, in the other, a silver bullet with his name on. It would be so easy to just load the gun, open his mouth and pull the trigger. Exit stage left, Gabriel Rush.

  And the sixty four thousand dollar question, what would he be leaving behind?

  “I’ll take hopeless losers, for two hundred, Alex.” Gabriel said to the television, playing Jeopardy with himself. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the loser on his own? Tick tock… Tick tock… I know, that’d be me, Alex.”

  Nothing was the answer. Nothing at all. He’d moved on. The Reservation wasn’t home, for all its beauty and all of the memories he associated with it, it was just another place where people didn’t know him from Adam. He’d cried the tears, nursed the hangovers and watched everyone swallow the lies of real life. Was there a chance? Could he find a way across the veil to bring his life back out of the Ghost Lodge? He wanted to scream. Wanted to put the gun between his lips and just do it, pull the fucking trigger and end it all. Sink into the black where that ghost of hope would stop taunting him.

  But there it was:

  In death maybe, just maybe, they could be together.

  It was stupid, but he couldn’t help thinking that if there was a chance, even the slightest chance, that the stories Wind Runner told were true, he’d risk it. He’d tear down the walls between life and death from the inside out or the outside in to bring her back…

  Gabriel slipped the silver bullet into the breach and put the .38s muzzle into his mouth. His finger closed ever so slowly tighter around the slick trigger. Easing it down.

  He closed his eyes.

  Ashley’s face was waiting for him as it always was when he closed his eyes, beautiful, the way he wanted to remember her, only to die again, the bullets from his gun stealing the beauty with their brutal steel kisses. Her blood was all over his hands. It might just as well have been his bullets that killed her.

  “Will you never forgive me?” he whispered to his hands.

  Never, my little Indian, a hateful voice flittered in his mind.

  He quested about inside his thoughts, seeking out the Angel’s touch, but his mind was lonely. A single personality dwelling in the darkness. Only him. Gabriel. Haunting himself.

  Gabriel closed his mouth around the cold steel of the .38’s barrel, tasting the sour gun metal on the tip of his tongue, like blood. He wanted so desperately to pull the trigger but just couldn’t. He wasn’t strong enough; or weak enough.

  No, he was going to live and try to learn to live with the impossible hope, to live with the yearning for a miracle…

  There was time for all the miracles now, for the angels and the ghosts to come, for women alight with their own hate, for born again child killers, for undead priests doing the resurrection shuffle, for restless souls to stand forever on street corners awaiting forgiveness for their mortal sins. For an inner city Wonderland, a world of glass and colour where angels didn’t fear to tread… To cross into the Land of Dead Souls, to look for a love he could bring home…

  Time was all he had.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Gabriel said, slipping the gun back into its holster. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Outside, it stopped raining.