Angel of Ruin

by Kim Wilkins

  Betty watched her for a few moments, as she dropped her head once more to her work. “You will not be moved, then?”

  “I will not be moved,” Deborah replied, eyes on the page in front of her.

  “What am I to do for your sister’s madness?”

  “Her cure will come. I have no doubt it is lurking nearby, waiting for an appropriate moment to push its advantage.”

  Betty’s bones grew cold. “You sound as though you speak of a person.”

  “Not a person.”

  “Then of whom … of what do you speak?”

  Deborah answered dismissively, a schoolmaster’s inflection to a pupil. “Stay ignorant, Betty. ’Tis the safest route.”

  Betty rose and left, wishing she had stayed in Suffolk.

  Mary kicked a stone along the path disconsolately. Where was the benefit in taking a walk to clear her head when all around smelled like stale firewood, when smoke still rose in choking whirlwinds from beyond the city walls, when all of it had been to no purpose?

  Her angel was gone. A hundred years’ imprisonment, and she had not been able to save him. She blamed Anne, she blamed Deborah, and eventually she blamed herself. Long fantasies plagued her, where a century passed and somehow she was miraculously still alive, where he came to her and confessed his love, his undying love. For now the pleasures of the flesh seemed far less significant than the longings of the heart.

  She idled up the hill and pushed the front door open. The house was quiet. Anne must be sleeping. Mary found her ravings impossible to bear; the sign of a weak spirit, not a weak mind. Mary had done what needed to be done, and would not have done otherwise. Lazodeus was the centre of the firmament for her; any sacrifice was a small one. Betty’s trunk blocked the hallway. When had she arrived home? She glanced in and saw Father sitting in his chair, his eyes closed. Was he dozing? Impossible to tell. She watched him a few moments and felt a violent rage brewing inside her. It had all started with him, hadn’t it? Father and his grand epic. Why could he not write plays or limericks? Why did he feel it so necessary to inquire into the affairs of angels?

  He roused and opened his unseeing eyes, appeared to fix them directly upon her. “Who is there?”

  “’Tis Mary, Father,” she said.

  “Why do you stand there?”

  “I’m looking at you, Father.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “To memorise the face of the author of my miseries.”

  Father frowned. “Have you caught your sister’s madness? Are you raving withal?”

  “Oh no, Father,” she said, approaching him and standing over his chair. “I am perfectly sane.”

  “Then why do you speak to me so? Where is the respect due to me?”

  “What is due to you is affront, what is due to you is denunciation.”

  He straightened his back in his chair, eyelids pulled up menacingly. “Well then, daughter. Denounce me.”

  A moment passed, her breath was caught in her throat. Then, with a gasp, she unleashed some of her rage. “I wish your Paradise Lost to be a spectacular failure. Your words are a blight on humanity, a testament to your unbridled vanity and arrogance. You are so swollen with pride it has strook you blind, and you think it nothing to justify the ways of God to man. Who are you? Who are you really but a sad little blind man whose best days are behind him, whose ugly wife married him for want of a better offer, whose daughters despise him and laugh about him when he cannot hear?” Mary’s heart fluttered wildly in her chest. The room seemed terribly warm. She had said it, but she felt no better.

  Father’s face was carved in stone. “I gave you life,” he said quietly.

  “Would that you hadn’t. For it is all misery.” She turned to leave, but at that moment Max ran in, glad to see her return, and she tripped over him. To break her fall, she threw her arm out but overbalanced with a painful pull in her ankle. Father caught her.

  “Let me go,” she said, although he had already pushed her gently to her feet and released her. “Max, bad boy!” In angry humiliation she kicked him. He yelped and ran, and the guilt sucked all the air from her lungs.

  “Max? Max, I’m sorry.” She ran after him, hobbling slightly on the ankle she had pulled. She couldn’t see him in the hallway or on the stairs, so moved as quickly as she could through the kitchen and out into the garden. “Max? Max, I —”

  She stopped short when she saw Deborah sitting on the stone bench under the wall, cradling a grateful Max in her arms. She and her sister had avoided speaking with each other, avoided even meeting eyes, since Tuesday night, when Mary and a crazed Anne had returned home after midnight, sooty and soiled. After Mary bathed Anne and put her in Betty’s bed, Deborah had been waiting for her in the bedroom.

  “Sister, you are home exceeding late,” she had said.

  The first shock was seeing Deborah alive and well; the second, bitter shock was knowing she had failed. Midnight had passed, the manuscript had been saved, and Lazodeus was gone.

  Now, here in the garden, Deborah met her gaze evenly. Max licked her face and hands.

  “And why are you not locked away in your coop like the foul creature you are?” Mary said.

  “I sought fresh air. But now you fill it with your fetid words.”

  Mary approached, and Max shrank against Deborah’s chest.

  “Give him to me,” Mary said.

  “He is quite happy in my arms for the present,” Deborah said. “Look you, he is frightened of you.”

  “I accidentally kicked him.”

  “In the same way you accidentally locked me in Paul’s while it burned?”

  “I thought I was doing the right thing!”

  “You’ll forgive me for not sharing such a view.”

  “You could not understand, for you have never loved.”

  “Never loved!” Deborah put Max aside and rose. “How dare you say such a thing? I loved you, I loved Anne. And do you see where it has brought me?”

  “It is different when one loves a man, an angel. He is gone, Deborah, because I failed to destroy the manuscript.”

  “What do you mean?” Deborah narrowed her eyes.

  “He was under threat of a century’s incarceration if Anne and I did not destroy the manuscript.”

  “So I was to be sacrificed along with it?”

  “You would not listen to reason.”

  “There was no reason to be had! It pleases me, Mary, that you will never see him again. I feel that you have been punished sufficiently.”

  Mary wanted to stamp her feet, to cry out, to pull Deborah’s hair. But she had never been so keenly aware that they were both grown women, not children fighting over a toy. “I am in pain!” she wailed. “I die for the loss of him.”

  “I care not, Mary. As long as nobody else has to die, I care not.” She brushed past, and Mary couldn’t help herself shoving Deborah with her shoulder.

  Deborah stopped and turned her head. “My relief at his disappearance is immeasurable.”

  Mary saw the glint of silver at her throat and remembered the demon key. Suddenly the idea came to her that she may be able to get a message to Lazodeus somehow, if she had the nerve to steal the key and call upon a demon.

  “I do not expect you to understand,” Mary said.

  “Sister, if I understood your motives, I would not like myself.” She moved away. Mary knelt down to beckon Max, and he approached her warily.

  “I’m sorry, little man,” she said, rubbing his head. A tentative lick told her all was forgiven. Would that Deborah was so pliable. Would that the whole universe would bend so easily to her will.

  Anne woke but reality was no relief from the dreams; dreams where she left her sister to burn to death. She was lost again, though she remembered something about the curtains which surrounded her. What was it, though? What was it about the curtains? A panic seized her and she heard an awful moan, like someone in terrible pain. Who is that poor soul? She sounds very close.

  The curtains
were Betty’s, that was it. Betty had been here and said the words that everyone was saying, “Deborah is alive.” But it made as little sense to Anne as a sentence in Greek, because it didn’t fit the world at all. Deborah was in the church and the church was on fire, but Mary closed the door. Mary propped it shut with a piece of wood. Mary dragged her to the river.

  And then the curtains fell down and there they were still, pale and amorphous in the sunlight. She was missing something … where had she put it?

  “Lazodeus,” she said, and Liza thought the call was for her and approached.

  “Mistress Mary.”

  “Not you.”

  “You called my name.”

  “Not you. It could never be you!” She picked up a burning ember and flung it at Liza, but Liza didn’t even flinch. When she looked at her hand it was white and clean. Where had that ember gone?

  “Calm yourself.”

  “Where is my angel?”

  But Liza didn’t answer and Anne was falling back inside her head now, where the grey was not as confusing as the many bright colours and sharp shapes which made up the world. Who is that poor soul?

  The least he could do was to come to her. She had killed her sister for him. Where was he? Had something gone wrong? She groaned, thinking about how slowly the hundred years would pass. She would be hungry again long before that, and how could she eat when he was locked in a cold dungeon with nothing?

  “Where is my angel?” a woman said. Perhaps it was her. Everything remained grey and all the voices in her head were sobbing as though to shake the earth.

  “Father? Liza said you wished to speak with me?”

  “Yes, Deborah. Come in and sit down.”

  This had to be about Anne. He was going to command her again to talk to her sister, convince her she was alive and well. Deborah didn’t know if she was capable of refusing him a second time. Wednesday night’s disagreement still haunted her, his exasperated annoyance, his glowering disapproval of her.

  “Of what did you wish to speak?”

  He steepled his fingers together in front of him and tapped his chin. “What do I spend most of my time doing, Deborah?”

  “I know not, Father.” An odd question. It threw her.

  “Come, make a guess.”

  “You like to be read to, and you like to compose letters, and to walk …”

  “But when I have no one to assist me in those things — for well you know I have no eyes — what do you think I do with my time?”

  She ventured an answer. “I expect you sit here and think, Father.”

  “Indeed, I do. I think and I think. Not much escapes my notice or my scrutiny.”

  This line of conversation was headed in a direction which made Deborah uncomfortable. “I should imagine not.”

  He released his hands as if banishing the thought. “Enough of that. I merely meant to show you that I may sometimes understand more about a situation than you are aware.”

  “I see. Is that all, Father?” She moved to leave.

  “No, sit, sit. I am not finished.”

  She settled again, watching him. He smiled and she smiled back, a small invisible smile.

  His face became serious again. “Deborah, the fire destroyed my house on Bread Street.”

  “I guessed it might have. Are you sad, Father? Was it not the house of your childhood?”

  “My childhood I’d soon enough be rid of. No, the problem is that the rent from that house was supporting us all.”

  “Indeed? I knew not.”

  “And why should you? You are a girl … a young woman. What need you know of your Father’s fortunes?”

  Deborah found herself confused by Father’s meandering logic. The feeling of discomfort returned. “Then why did you tell me?”

  “No reason, no reason. Or, perhaps there may be a reason, but only you would know.”

  She shifted in her seat, as though being an inch closer might bring her closer to his meaning.

  “Deborah? You have not answered.”

  “Sir, I can make no sense of your words.”

  “I shall be more plain. We are all but penniless. If there should be a way to regain what finances we have lost — I have no wish to be a rich man, you understand — but if there should be a way … I leave it to you. My best and brightest daughter.”

  And suddenly she understood. Not much escapes my notice or my scrutiny. Had he some suspicion of her dealings in the unseen world? Indeed, why should he not? She had returned miraculously unharmed from a burning church with his manuscript just days before, and perhaps over the passing months he had gleaned some hushed mentions of magic or angels. Now he seemed to suggest that she, through some occult intervention, reinstate his lost fortune.

  “I … I know not how to respond,” she said, for the silence required filling and she knew it was her duty.

  “Respond as you see fit, Deborah. Do not mistake me, I advise no greater loss for such a gain. I trust to your judgement. I trust you.” He said this last grudgingly, and leaned back in his chair. “You may go.”

  She stood though her knees felt oddly jointed, and made her way back up the stairs. Certainly, she could pretend that she knew no magic, and perhaps that would be a relief to him. But how would they live without money? How would they eat and keep warm? She could endure hardship for herself, but Father was an old man.

  Yet to use the demon key for such venal ends was sure to send her soul spinning down to Pandemonium.

  22

  This Horror Will Grow Mild, this Darkness Light

  Mary did not sleep. How could she? Her mind was full of the possibilities in Deborah’s demon key. It commanded spirits, and spirits lived in Pandemonium. She could find one to pass on a message to Lazodeus, to tell him she loved him and she was sorry. Or even gather information from him about some other method to effect his release.

  But Deborah was her enemy and would be guarding against her.

  “I have done it once ere this,” she whispered to her pillow in the dark. The dolt wore it on the same chain about her neck as she always had worn it.

  Mary flipped over again, stared at the moon above the neighbouring house. What had Betty once said? Bad luck to look at the new moon through glass? Long ago, when such innocent superstition had been all she knew of the mystical, she had been a different person. She had been a girl playing at womanhood with red satin and strings of pearls in her hair. She could barely contemplate how far she had travelled since then.

  She threw back the covers and rose. Since the fire the weather had begun to cool, and her feet sought out the rug. She crept, one foot quietly in front of the other, to Deborah’s closet.

  Opened the door.

  Approached the bed.

  Deborah sat up. “What is it, Mary?”

  “I … are you awake?”

  “I woke the instant I heard your foot hit the floor. You’ll understand that I no longer trust you.”

  “I thought I heard you crying out, having a bad dream.”

  “Perhaps it was Anne downstairs.”

  Mary assessed her sister, her long pale hair and even features. She knew it was wrong to feel such a tug of anger that Deborah was more beautiful than her, but she was so tired of applying civilised laws to her more primal feelings. She pounced on her and began wrestling the chain off her neck.

  “Ow. What are you doing?”

  “Give me your demon key,” Mary said. “Don’t make me hurt you for it.”

  “Indeed, it is you who shall be hurt.” Deborah grabbed Mary’s hair and wrenched it, then got her elbow between them and used it to pry Mary off.

  Mary fell to the floor with a thump. Deborah was much stronger than her and Mary felt keenly aggravated by this fact. Deborah was her baby sister.

  “I hate you!” she cried.

  “I care not how you feel for me, Mary.” So reasonable, so irritatingly reasonable.

  “Keep your damned key.”

  “So I shall.”

&nbs
p; Mary stood and stormed out, slamming the door behind her. What now? She was far too agitated to contemplate sleeping. Max was curled in a ball on the corner of the bed, and she sat next to him and stroked him gently. How was she to trick Deborah out of her key? Violence? Poison? Pleading? Blackmail?

  Then her perspective widened out and she considered for the first time that perhaps she needed no key to command a demon. She remembered that awful day when a demon had come disguised as the King, and Lazodeus had said that some elementals could hear one’s wishes and respond to them. Perhaps she had something to offer such a creature in return for contact with Lazodeus.

  She scrambled out her window, still in her shift, edged along the ledge and dropped into her secret room. It was much warmer in here, with all the floor coverings and thick curtains. Mary had avoided coming to the room since the fire; all these reminders of her time spent with Lazodeus were painful to her. She lay down on a pile of cushions in the centre of the room and looked up. It seemed impossible that his warm body, his faint luminescence, his clear eyes should now be denied her. He had become the most significant element of her life; without him, it was almost impossible to imagine herself.

  She sat up and brushed her hair off her face. Courage now. The demons were awful, disgusting things, but if making a deal with one was her key to seeing Lazodeus again, then she would do it.

  “I call upon whichever demon is nearby …” Was that the right thing to say? She couldn’t imagine how else to call them. She cleared her throat and started again. “I call upon whichever demon can hear my plea. I wish to trade whatever I can of value to make contact with Lazodeus.”

  The air seemed suddenly full of a hushed chattering. One voice grew louder and louder, and she realised it was saying her name: Marymarymarymary …

  “Who is there?” she said, looking around.

  The chattering suddenly stopped and a demon appeared before her. Although the confusion of features was the same as the other demons she had seen, it was recognisably a different individual. She hoped it had a kinder nature than others she had met.