“You let her go or I’ll kill you,” he said, his voice frighteningly controlled. The natives cowered and some covered their eyes.
At the booming sound of his threat the group scattered, leaving Mary lying alone on the ground.
“You can’t kill me,” she said with a laugh. “It’s only a joke, Nick. A little trick. A surprise. I wasn’t going to harm her.”
Suddenly Nick flung his body down and forward, slamming the child to the earth. “You bitch! You devil!”
She laughed into his face and he raised a fist to hit her, but she held it at bay with her mind. He struggled, grimacing, and still he could not bring down his fist.
He leaped off her and turned to Mary. She was truly mad now, her eyes flicking right and left, her mouth foaming with terror. He leaned over her repeating soft entreaties. “Hush, Mary, come back, Mary, it’s going to be all right, hush now, come back to me…”
As he untied the naked woman, the group crept from the shadows, surrounding him, watching.
“It was just an experiment to see how strong she was,” Angelique said, but she did not sound contrite.
“I’d kill you for this if I could,” he said. He had Mary untied and on her feet, he swept her into his arms and hurried to the car.
Squealing away from the gathering, throwing dust into the air, Nick fled the unholy scene. He held the shivering woman under his arm. “Shhhh. We’re going home.”
All the way to Charlotte Nick seethed and plotted, railed against the injustice, swore revenge, and cuddled the softly weeping woman against his chest. Against his heart.
#
His anger surprised him, as did his depth of feeling for Mary. They had been together for almost ten years and all that time Angelique had left them alone. Maybe she thought he would tire of the woman and discard her as a child would a plaything. Maybe she finally grew jealous. Or maybe she was as evil as Satan and he had always known it. Though they were all fallen from grace, not every one of the angels were in league with Lucifer.
He might be a lost soul, wandering now against the will of his creator in the guise of a human, but he could not find real malice in his heart, except…except against Angelique. Was it the accident of being trapped in a child’s body that made her so cruel? Or was her soul as dark as the night the moment she fomented protest against her god?
For weeks Nick nursed Mary back to a semblance of sanity. He hired a nurse to care for her when he had to be absent to run the many businesses that depended on him. He rushed back to her side as soon as he could every time he had to leave for the downtown city.
Mary did not remember the incident that had brought her so low. In the past few years she had even erased the murder of her husband. Being abducted, stripped, and held in bondage in a wild place had precipitated a break with reality so final that Nick feared she would never be right again.
Angelique had said, “Why burden yourself with this weak human, a murderer? Yes, I know what she’s done, you don’t think I plumbed every crevice of her poor mind? You could have anyone. Why tether yourself to this…this specimen?”
“It’s not up to you to pick my companions for me. I will not discuss this with you.” He had not forgiven her, but his fate was tangled with Angelique. He could no more walk away from her than he could desert Mary.
Nick spent hours at Mary’s side talking soothingly to her, reminding her of his love, his care. It took months, but eventually she came round to herself. “You’re a lovely man,” she said one day, lifting a hand to caress his cheek.
“We should run away together and get married.”
This was a refrain she often employed, as if she were a teen or a young woman and he her suitor. In fact she was a woman nearing fifty now. Had she been a more sensible woman she would already have noted the difference in their ages—that she had aged while he had not.
He was still sexually attracted to Mary, but he recognized their relationship was now moving toward a time when they would sit like an old couple, sit and stare into one another’s eyes remembering earlier days together. He took her hand from his face and held fast to it.
“I would marry you any time you want,” he said, kissing the top of her hand.
“Oh,” she said, her eyelashes fluttering. “I would have to get my father’s permission for that.”
Her parents had been dead twenty years. Nick simply smiled and held her close. Tomorrow she would lure him to her bed. For today she was a woman being courted, demure and flirtatious.
He loved her so…
#
Angelique tried again and again. With each human sacrifice she thought she could bring down another angel to take the dying body, and each time she failed. Fury caused her to lash out against the breathless bodies. She hit them with her small fists, pounding them in the chest and face. Her anger scared the little group of Haitians so that they withdrew from the ritual circle, heads and gazes averted. They all knew the child was more than a child; some thought her a demon. None of them, having joined their fates with her, knew how to extricate themselves. She was too powerful to cross, too knowing and fearsome to run from.
“What’s wrong?” Nick asked. Angelique had been sullen for weeks.
“I have no success bringing down more of our kind. I keep trying and failing.”
Nick found this to be an interesting turn of affairs. There was something Angelique could not do?
“You’ve found newly lifeless bodies for these attempts?”
Angelique gave him a sideways glance. “That’s not the point. The point is I fail.”
“But you were able to bring me back so easily.”
Angelique nodded, thinking. “You had such fervor to return.”
He remembered that long ago time when he was given another chance at life on earth. His soul had been fleet as he lunged toward the body of the circus wire-walker. He’d had no hesitation at all. Any world was preferable to the emptiness. He had longed for life so long that it made up his whole character--a longing to be—only that.
“Do you think they don’t want to come?” This thought was impossible to him, but he could not divine the longings or lack of them in his fellow angels.
Angelique did not answer. She strode from the room, her little shoes snapping a staccato across the polished floor in her wake.
Nick stared after her. Maybe he had hit on the problem and she already knew. He sighed. He turned on the RCA radio on the table near his chair. He adjusted the station finder and the volume. He sat listening to voices filling the room, keeping him company.
The world was so different now. Cities seemed to grow overnight. Technology provided electricity, indoor plumbing, radio, refrigerators, and a plethora of motorized vehicles. Nations were growing in both population and expectation of real wealth. Except for the thundercloud of World War II looming on the horizon with Germany rattling its swords, the earth was a veritable garden of Eden. The last time the world had been so majestic was during the Roman Empire, but even that great republic had never seen such miraculous times such as these.
And never had Nick been more content. He could not take Angelique’s frustrations seriously. Her plan to bring all the fallen angels to earth to take over the world was a foolish desire anyway. It was the wish of a megalomaniac not in full control of her senses. That the two of them had been able to make earth home was a double miracle in itself. If no angel ever again took human form it would be all right with Nick.
They all possessed the ability to choose their own fates. If some of them were happy with where they spent eternity, how was it up to Angelique or anyone else to question or override those decisions?
He turned his attention back to the radio program, a comedy show featuring a silly woman with a silly voice, and forgot all about the furious little girl who was in another part of the house. Let Angelique fume. Let her fuss. Let her rail against heaven for all he cared. She had to know her limits. After all, she was not the creator, nor was she the Son of the Morning, Lu
cifer, the bright and shining. She was merely a fallen rebel, pretending to be more than she could ever hope to be. He could have told her that long ago, had she been willing to listen. He could have told her the dreams of rebellion and power had been a lost cause from the very beginning.
CHAPTER 19
A MORTAL PASSING
Nick knew poor Mary was leaving him by looking at her. She was not going away with someone else. She was going away permanently from this plane of being; she was dying.
First the whites of her eyes yellowed. Then her fingernails and toenails took on a bluish tint. Her teeth loosened in her mouth and she complained of pain low in her back where her kidneys were located. Although she was not quite sixty, all her organs were failing. Perhaps it had something to do with the beatings she had taken from her husband. Or perhaps she was just a frail woman, destined to endure only a short lifespan.
It had been some time since the two of them had engaged in sexual congress, due to her lack of desire and his trepidation. He had confessed to her years ago that he was not exactly human. He was, but he wasn’t.
Being mad, she sometimes just accepted these strange state of affairs and at other times she shrunk from his touch, as if he were a monster.
Now that she was dying, he often sat and held her, his arms about her shoulders, her head on his chest. He loved her no less than he had when she was young, but now it was a different kind of love--a love for one he knew as intimately as he had never known another being. He felt sorrow, an emotion he had only felt as an angel thrown out of his element. This sorrow was not as deep, but just as lasting.
“I’m not beautiful,” she said, cuddling close to him, twining her fingers in the fingers of his hand. “But you’ve loved me anyway. Why is that?”
“I think it’s because you’ve always needed me. At least that’s what I used to think. Now I realize it’s because I needed you.”
“I’m sick, aren’t I?”
He said nothing.
She sighed and it was the only sound in the room, a sound of acquiescence, a sound of leaves turning in the wind, floating to earth.
“What will you do when I am gone?”
That was like her, to worry about him left behind more than she worried about her own demise.
“I don’t know.”
“You once said you were an angel. That must mean there is a god and heaven.”
“That’s what it means.”
“I can rely on that?” Now she sounded afraid and even if it wasn’t true, which it was, at this point he would have lied to her.
“Yes,” he said. “You can rely on it.”
He called in a doctor that week and was told there was nothing to be done. The woman was weakening. She would be gone soon.
A week later when he came to visit, the nurse he had hired to care for Mary met him at the door. “She hasn’t long now.”
Nick hurried to her bedside. She looked gray, a shadow self of the woman he had known so many years. Her dark hair was now silver and wispy. Twin lines etched her mouth and her eyes were watery and pale. She reached out a trembling hand to him. He sat and held onto her until her eyelids fluttered and stilled, until her chest no longer rose with breath, until she had left him forever—without a word, without a backward glance.
He could not remember ever weeping. Ever. He had not shed a tear as angel or man, until this moment of loss. He rubbed at the streaks of tears wetting his cheeks. He brought his hands away and stared in surprise at the tears. He couldn’t bear to leave her all through the night. He spent the hours asking God what the meaning of all this was. Why create such flawed and weak creatures as men, only to let them suffer and die? As Caesar he had been run through with a dozen knives and short swords, suffering pain and dying, but that was nothing compared to watching Mary die. He had known he only borrowed the great man’s body for a while. Mary, on the other hand, had inhabited the only body given to her and now it had failed and left nothing but a husk behind. Where was she now? Did her blithe spirit reside with God, as he hoped, or did it wait in some nether region for an ultimate summoning at the end of time when all manner of beings would be gathered?
He was not privy to the mind of God. He also did not understand or trust the Bible or the prophets who wrote it. He had been cast out and shut off from what knowledge he had earned before. All he knew was that he had lost the one human he had come to love most and he was bereft beyond words.
He put one hand on his heart, closed his eyes, and wondered if he could feel that heart breaking. Because that is what it was doing, now, this moment, breaking in two, half of it dying with his Mary. He felt it as an intimate pain so real and so deep that he thought he would have to lie down and close his eyes, just like his beloved, lie down beside her and wish for his own darkness.
When morning dawned, he rose from beside her and covered his love's calm face with the sheet. He made funeral arrangements. He took the streetcar for the last time away from her house. He couldn’t go back to the mansion where Angelique waited. She would read his face and know of his tragedy. He couldn’t stand to see her gloat or have her tell him she had warned him about this sad end. She would remind him of what a fool he had been to get involved in the first place. She would remind him they really had no business on this planet, cavorting with God's favorite beings.
He went to a city park and sat on a bench in the shade of great oaks. He watched squirrels argue, people walking dogs, clouds skuddling by in the blue vault of the sky. He almost wished he had never asked Angelique for human life. He’d had no inkling he would ever have to grieve—or what this grief would do to him. A sudden realization dawned. He was more human than angel; he was almost entirely human. By loving so deeply he had given up a large part of his celestial heritage.
Angelique, on the other hand, was so little human and so large an angel that she hardly understood the creatures she interacted with. Being her companion and helpmate, he consorted with evil incarnate. Having been cast from the sight and conversation with her creator, she hadn’t embraced the earth beings she pretended to be a part of. She used them, manipulated them, cheated, robbed, and killed them, but she could not know what divinity they represented because she could not empathize with their plight. They were born, lived briefly, and died.
Angelique (and he) would never die, never face extinction—even for a brief time. Either on earth or in the outer reaches of creation they still lived and were conscious. They were eternal as God himself.
Finally he understood the true meaning of punishment. Consciousness. To know and feel and think forever. To perceive this loneliness and separation forever. That was what they had been granted as angels, even as they were cast out.
He put his head into his hands and tried to blot out the real world. He never should have come here, to this place, with this master. He had joined a macabre dance with Angelique that was meant to either destroy him or separate him even further from the creator.
Loving Mary had taught him the hard truth. He was truly lost.
He always had been.
CHAPTER 20
WANDERING THE WASTELAND
In order to hide from Angelique it was necessary for Nisroc—now called Nick—to cloak his mind from her penetrating intelligence. He had no more use for her game of voodoo, ritual sacrifice, or acquisition of earthly wealth. It was all child’s play to him and he searched for something more substantial. What that might be he couldn’t say. Having experienced love, he wanted no more of it. He actually had no idea what he really wanted. Not to be sent back to the darkness, for one thing, he was adamant about that. Though he was lonely among those of the earth, it was not the same loneliness he knew while waiting in the purgatory of nothingness.
He wandered, walking slowly, whistling softly. He left the park and took city streets until they ended in highways. He moved that day toward the setting sun and soon the city was at his back. He kept going, realizing the finality of his decision to leave. Nothing could cause him to t
urn back. He would walk until he tired in the night and then he would lie down in shadow and sleep. The next day he rose up and began again, the sun this time at his back.
The days lengthened before him and the highway spun out into the distance, a siren calling him forward. He walked, ambled, strolled, giving his attention to nature—the wind, the heat, the sky and pavement he tread. Nights he took refuge in abandoned houses, along roadsides in ditches, beneath the trees and rocks of whatever locale he found himself. He met a few others on the road, also wanderers, some of them still broke by the collapse of Wall Street in 1929, others evading the war with Germany on the horizon. He traveled with no one for very long, happier to be on his own.
He saw many kinds of churches and synagogues along the way, but feared entering them. Though he had long since regretted his argument with his creator and his choice to follow Angelique into separation and darkness, he knew he still had no connection to God. Once turning his back, he could never change that momentous decision. An unclean, unnatural being had no place in a house of worship.
He ate only enough to keep the body healthy, savoring nothing. He drank when thirsty, took shelter from storm or cold, and kept to himself as much as possible.
Not that there hadn’t been times he was forced into situations where he had to interact. Once he had been attacked by ruffians outside of a large city in Louisiana. His clothes were not yet in tatters so he looked like a man of means, except for the worn leather of his shoes, but the thieves could not see the holes in the soles.
Two of the scoundrels took him by the arms and a third rushed to strike him in the face. Without thinking what he was doing and depending entirely on an instinct of preservation, Nick left the ground, dragging his two attackers with him into the air as they clung to his arms. His wings, black as soot and larger by far than his body, lifted them all ten feet above the ground. Yelping, they let go, plummeting to the ground then leaping to their feet and backing away, yipping like mongrel dogs. The man who had hit him stared up at the thing that floated many feet above him and began to quiver all over. “What the hell…?
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