Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  “S’okay,” Bell said, and ran her other hand through his hair. It was bound and garlanded with thorns. She picked them out one by one. They stung her fingers to bleeding. “We weren’t made for this. We’re not this anymore.”

  “Bent to it,” Candle said, and flickered the cold of the tomb. “It’s our job now. Got no other.”

  He was cold, too cold. His hair lay rank with smoke.

  It set her to burning.

  “Never again,” she told him fierce as trumpets, and he sagged into her arms.

  She took him home to her flat over the Aniseed Bakery, where old men drank strong coffee in quail-egg cups and told the same stories daily about the last war. She fed him figs and strong cheese, champagne and lobster, and sang him lullabyes in her crow-voice when he shook at night. She hung his room with peacock feathers; they swayed in the breeze and swept rose and poppy petals in tea-leaf patterns on the floor.

  She lay awake when he slipped in at three, four in the morning, and stripped off his paints and pearls and torn pantyhose, and ached as he hummed hearthsongs.

  On Midsummer morning he stayed out until seven, past sunrise, and brought in the post with him. Bell sat at the kitchen table with a mug of weak tea, stirring it this way and that with her lace-covered index finger. “What’s that?” she asked, alto. The bitterness seeped through her fingers and soured the tea.

  Candle held it out between fingernails painted like galaxies. It was tied with a ribbon, musty, yellowed, stamped with symbols in running black ink.

  “From Book,” she said, and put on her boots and hat.

  Bell, Book, and Candle met at the Cafe Mariposa, and Book hunched over the wrought iron table. Ladybugs fluttered around his balding head and landed, freckled with concern.

  “There’s word,” Book said, and squeezed his old hands in hers. They came away bloody.

  “Book,” she said, mouth open. “What’s happened?”

  “I lost a bet,” he said, and closed his eyes—Book never lost bets. The seams between lid and lash were so thin she thought they did not exist. “They made me call.”

  Bell caught her breath. It tasted like a poison scream deep in her throat. She looked up at Candle’s eyes, and the life in them flickered, guttered, dimmed.

  “Run,” she choked.

  Wool-coated men blocked the door to the Cafe Mariposa, even though it was high summer. Wool-coated men lined up on the patio, a masked and cloaked barrier between the glass-dangle birds and the street. Bell backed against Candle and Candle picked up Book. They had not been called for centuries: she’d watched the inquisitors put to the sword and wept, oh help her, wept for the loss of their purpose.

  Where had they all come from?

  Somewhere behind them struggled a young man, bound at wrist and ankle and roughly gagged. His terror straightened her spine. “We’ve come,” Bell said automatic, and clamped her hands over her mouth.

  The high magistrate smiled. She could see it through his mask. She could see through his flesh and bones. “Do you serve?” he asked, and the cream on the tables soured.

  “Run,” Candle whispered, and levered into the tree.

  Bell dug one leather-booted toe into the gaps of the hatstand tree and climbed. Rose-thorns pricked her stockinged legs. Bell grabbed the knobby hat hooks of generations past, levered herself up between the rivers of moss, the beetles that fished them and lived on their shores. Candle flitted upwards like a burning rainbow, Book slung over his shoulder, birds querying anxiously into his delicate pierced ears. The inquisitors swept in after them, dangled their prey on a hat-hook, displacing a thin shawl printed with acres of puffy-clouded sky. Thorns thickened and spiraled about them, tugged at her feet, blocked out the light.

  Candle reached down and hauled Bell into the nest of branches of the Cafe Mariposa’s tree. The thorns closed around them and sealed the exit. Bell, Book, and Candle huddled together in the waving, endless leaves and breathed hard.

  “Do you serve?” the high magistrate called, and she quivered.

  “You speak,” Book whispered, arms cradling his slit belly. “Just don’t answer.”

  Bell pressed her palms against her ears and shut her eyes tight tight, clamped her lips down on the words that centuries of ritual had hardwired onto her tongue. She shook her head once, twice, focused on the jerk and fly of her short-cut hair instead of the burn in her throat.

  Won’t. She thought. Never again.

  Where had they all come from?

  The acid bubbled up into her mouth. It was going to burn her voice out, it was going to scorch her throat for good and she’d never sing again even in a voice mutilated from centuries of screaming—

  “We serve,” she choked out, and wailed as the ritual took her.

  “Keep her quiet,” Book hissed—he scribbled and scratched, dipped pen in his own seeping blood to keep it wet and live.

  “We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors—” the magistrate said, and the tree shook with anger, leaves raining down in a rustling diving assault. “Ring the bell.”

  Weeping, she opened her mouth to speak, and the words were stopped by Candle’s lips upon hers. Candle’s tongue in her mouth. Candle’s hands on her waist.

  “Ring the bell?” the high magistrate called, a fearful note in his voice, but she felt nothing but Candle’s kiss.

  Bell spoke. Book carried messages, saw, described, deciphered. And Candle—Candle burned. Candle’s kisses warmed her to the centre, set her hips rising below his flower hands, shuddered through her like the end of a spell of rain. His hands danced upwards, splayed and expert upon her breasts, and the doom receded from her throat.

  She smelled cinnamon and honey and baking on his skin. He lifted her skirts with one practiced caress.

  “Ring the bell—” might have come up plaintive, and then Book notched a satisfied note in pen and blood in his battered notebook, and silence. The pen dripped red-black on the page, and Book’s book looked much bigger for a hot, fevered moment: millions of pages and dates and names, the cover all of spidersilk, the ink blotting out each name sooner or later until it was pages and pages of night sky.

  Candle parted her legs, and the tree shuddered with her as he pressed inside.

  “Once I was an angel with a bright sword,” she gasped, whispered, wept. “Once I was a guard on the road to the city, at the gate to the city, and I stood alone and burned. Once I had a voice that sang not screamed, and wings of powdered silver and when they scratched me I did not bleed but sunlight poured out of the holes in my flesh and I would have swept down flaming and singing and they would fall upon their knees with the alleluia chorus—”

  “Shh,” Candle whispered back into her mouth. “Shh.”

  When it was done she lay curled-up in the arms of the tree, feeling its slow sap heartbeat spiked with the scent of tea leaves and time, the faint clinking of dishes and the hiss of a barista machine. When it was done she shook herself like a cat and sat up, summer light filtering through the branches onto her hand. Candle leaned against a branch opposite, looking cool and sleek as ever, his golden hair touched with flame.

  “There’s no word,” Book said, still holding his stomach. The bleeding had slowed. He sat better now.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, to him, to both of them. “I couldn’t have . . . I couldn’t have not spoken.”

  “That’s why we work together,” Candle said, and wiped the kisses off his soft, hot mouth.

  * * *

  Bell, Book, and Candle were to meet for the five thousand and fifty fourth time on the eve of summer turning to autumn, with the leaves just yellowing at the tips on the broad avenues between Dry Street and the open plains. Bell did not call; there would be no word. But she went down to the Cafe Mariposa.

  She ordered a Korean drink of cinnamon and honey and sipped it slow; it reminded her of the taste of Candle’s skin. It reminded her of the smell of his bedsheets, which she had not changed since the night they slew the Inquis
ition, since the night he sauntered out the door of Cafe Mariposa and did not return for his feathers and pearls. She slept in his alcove now, restless with the inadequacy of her own skin. But if she thought of him, sometimes, it was enough.

  Book had not seen him. Bell had not seen Book. He never lost a bet, and he had lost one somehow, and would not speak of how or why. All she knew was that the tattered Great Cathedral had burned from the bottom up in the week after midsummer, and pages, thousands of pages swirled in the air like ash and settled upon its gutted corpse.

  They were keeping something from her.

  But she’d remembered wings.

  Book came into the Cafe Mariposa with a new hunch to his walk, his pocket stuffed with pawn tags and a track card in his hatband. The newspaper was folded under his arm with his brown leather notebook, and a hardcover romance peeked out between its pages. He sat at the wrought iron table and dropped his parcel on its glass top.

  “Bell,” he said, and ordered a double shot of whiskey. He looked old. But his wrinkles were smiling.

  “Is he coming?” she said, with a catch in her voice.

  Book shook his head. “It doesn’t say.”

  They waited.

  At five to midnight Candle swept through the door on the arms of two girl-children barely old enough to drink, their dark eyes shining with his reflected light. His legs were wrapped in knotted silk scarves and his torso bare and muscled, and he wore no hat but a vineyard wreath, which he hung on a hook on the World Tree as he passed its thick trunk by. He stroked their hair and sent them to the counter with a wink and a wave, then perched backwards on his wrought-iron chair, cradled its back between his thighs.

  “What’s the word?” he asked, with a saucy wink and a bow to the Count three tables down.

  “No word,” Book breathed, and sagged back in his chair.

  “No word,” Bell said, and took his hand. “Wick, you’ll—”

  He kissed her hand elaborately and something moved in her throat. “I’ll see you next month,” he said, and stood, and lovers took each others’ hands and snuck away to the rooms veiled in silk and gauze in the hotel upstairs.

  Bell, Book, and Candle left the Cafe Mariposa just before close.

  Bell sung the changes all the way home.

  THE TARRYING MESSENGER

  by Michael J. DeLuca

  Pedals pumping, her breathing steady, Molly crests the hill, downshifts and coasts across the desert plateau.

  Rhythm. Perpetuity. The whirring, watch-like mechanism of a ten-speed bike, kept from obsolescence and the verges of rust by meticulous care. The comforting, controlled bend of a pair of straight braids in hot, dry wind. The necessity of holding her mouth firmly closed to keep out the dust. The intensity of coloration imposed upon bulbous red boulders by prescription sunglasses, and the wash of white that intrudes from beyond the edge of the lens. Molly thinks of the scientist whose job it is to make vibrant and dynamic the bleak images from the surface of Mars, and how she herself, via those tinted lenses, performs the same task.

  A highway sign sails past, like a fellow satellite on a different trajectory. A town rises out of the earth’s curvature: heat-shimmers, irrigation, green landscaping made fantastic by contrast with the pale colors of the desert. And on the town’s outskirts, high atop sandstone cliffs like courses of bricks laid by the hand of God, a man-made structure gleams—all stark, straight lines and perpendicularity, concrete and glass. Art in conflict with nature. A church.

  Below it, a parking lot full of windblasted cars, sparkling. Tourists—of whom Molly does not count herself one, though she has never been to Sedona before and does not mean to stay. She isn’t here to leave her mark upon the landscape, or to capture part of it to take home. She’s just a traveler.

  Molly angles away from the highway, tracing the smooth curve of the white line exactly, the ten-speed’s wheels holding to it like a rail. She squeezes the brakes. Her sneaker scrapes against pavement.

  A water fountain. It bubbles up hot and slowly grows colder. Molly reminds herself not to drink too much. She fills her water bottles, though she has to queue up again with the tourists for each one.

  She tightens the straps on her saddlebags, walks the bike to the foot of the stairway where tourists wait to ascend the face of the cliff. A small crowd collects there: Germans, Texans, Japanese, children kicking at pebbles, babies sagging in the heat.

  And in their midst, an angel. Golden. Rigid. Immobile, strapped by its legs to the bed of a truck. It stands with knees bent and wings half-spread, as though just arriving, or about to depart. In one hand it carries a trumpet, in the other a scroll. A messenger.

  Molly cranes her neck, muscles pleasantly sore from the posture of cycling. The steeple, stark white against the cloudless sky, surmounted by nothing. She imagines the angel up there. The end of its journey. Nobody will see it from this close again. From those distant, gilded lips, no one will hear its message.

  Another week and Molly’s summer journey will end at the Pacific. A plane ride home, then back to her parents and school. The thought scares her. She has grown too accustomed to motion.

  Hydraulic brakes blast. A tractor-trailer pulls in off the highway, carrying a crane. Squat Navajo workmen push the crowd back from the angel, setting up cones.

  She feels faint, lightheaded. Too many miles, in too much heat. The angel swims before her eyes. She decides, in the interest of safety, to allow herself a rest.

  Molly hitches a ride into town. She sits in the rear of a pickup, the soles of her sneakers pressed together, one hand gripping the crossbar of the bike. She stretches her thighs, the tips of her braids tickling her shins. The broken red cliffs and the church recede. She sips water, already tepid, and thinks about the mindset of the West—of the kind of society that could exist among such spiritual landscape, yet feel the need to interrupt its beauty with a monument to God. The people riding in the cab of the pickup, a couple with a toddler—she wonders what makes their own mindset so different from hers. On the East Coast, churches are small, unassuming. It’s the ideas they enclose that betray them.

  In town, she buys lunch: avocado, sprouts and pickles on a crunchy baguette, iced green tea sweetened with agave. She retreats with her meal from the too-cold air conditioning, sits at a table on the sidewalk. Red rock mountains rise in the distance at either end of the long, main street. Rows of Tibetan prayer pennants strung between phone poles. A shop sells turquoise, woven blankets, kachina dolls; another beside it, astrological symbols, crystal pyramids, recordings of waterfalls. She visits these places, touching objects, looking the proprietor in the eye because she feels obliged to, because that’s what her trip across the country is supposed to be about. Truth versus indoctrination. The real versus the preconceived. She left the ten-speed locked outside the bank, but she carries the bike helmet with her, swinging from her wrist. It reminds her of her transience here—that none of what she does or sees need stick, or mean anything at all.

  “You have a glow about you,” says the plump Latina lady in the crystal shop. “An aura of detoxification and change.”

  Molly laughs nervously. “What, like I’m pregnant?” The joke comes out meaner than she meant.

  The lady smiles thinly and explains about auras. How they’re particularly visible in the desert air, the same way the stars at night seem magnified. “Your body is expelling toxins on both the physical and spiritual planes. There’s a buildup of negative feeling in your chakras that has suddenly begun to break free.”

  Molly brushes at her arms. Pedaling in desert heat, her pores produce not sweat but salt, a whitish haze on clothes and skin. “I’ve been riding a bike across country.”

  “For how long?” asks the lady.

  “Not long enough.”

  “That would explain it.” The lady places a tumbled gemstone on a silver chain around Molly’s neck. “Rhodochrosite. It’s believed to foster acceptance and serenity during periods of radical change.”

  The s
hop has mirrors everywhere. Molly hides a sour face. It’s a pink stone. Pink, with white impurities, and a startling streak of black. Makes her think of her mother. She can’t buy anything anyway. No room for trinkets in her budget, let alone room in her bags. She starts to pull it off. The lady gently grabs her wrists. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you do that. Negative energy, you understand—its release contaminates all those around you. I’m not asking you to buy the pendant. In fact, why don’t you take it? A gift. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask. . . . Please get out of my store and don’t come back.”

  Speechless, Molly drops the pendant back around her neck.

  On the way to the door, she passes a bulletin board full of ads for psychics, reiki, acupuncture. Hot springs excursions. Horseback tours of the canyons, Hopi ruins. A white flyer, pinned at the center of the board, shows a drawing of the church on the cliff. In the drawing, the angel is already in place atop the spire—just a stick-figure really, except for the wings. A halo surrounds it like a lens flare.

  Temple of the Line

  Celebrate the Raising of the Angel

  Sunday Service at Dawn

  She pushes through the door into the heat. The pink pendant sparkles.

  She imagines the church service inside that giant white monolith—windows behind the altar opening on desertscape, scraggly clusters of evergreens, red buttes. Someone in a robe, attempting to assign it a meaning different from the one she’s come to on her own.

  What day is it? Time blurs, spent rolling down the highway to wind and the whirr of gears. She waits for the bank sign to come around. 107° F. 1:12 PM. Sat., Sept. 6.

  A man strolls by in a sandwich board, his shadow sharp against the sidewalk. The words on the board warn of Armageddon, with an illustration of a landscape in flames. A big saguaro cactus going up like a devil’s fork. Molly hasn’t seen saguaros yet—not far enough south. Anyone who takes Revelations at face value must necessarily be immune to irony.