“No no no no no!” Kia cried and grabbed onto Orpheus’s visible hand. She pulled him back out of the wall and down to the ground. He stood there, looking around as if he hadn’t just been floating away from them.
“We’re going to find you a treat somewhere, okay?” Kia said. “There must be a coffee shop somewhere in this place.”
“I don’t need a treat,” Orpheus said. “There aren’t any treats in Heaven. Or any coffee shops.”
Kia looked at Lucien. “You need to do something,” she said. “Now.”
“Okay,” Lucien said. “It’s all going to be okay.” Although he thought it really wasn’t going to be okay.
“What’s a sorcerer?” Orpheus asked.
* * *
THEY MET the sorcerer in a cemetery, outside a boarded-up church. The church had been abandoned even before the angels came back. It was probably going to be turned into condos at some point. But for now it was just an empty church. It was the same place where Lucien had met the sorcerer the first time, when he’d hired him to create the dream.
The sorcerer was waiting for them when they parked the car in the lot. There were no other vehicles. He stood in the middle of the cemetery, drinking a Starbucks as he watched the sun rise. He wore the same black suit as before and Lucien still couldn’t identify the brand. He looked like he could have been a businessman on his way to work, except he was standing in an overgrown cemetery. He stared straight into the sun without squinting or blinking.
“Maybe we need a priest instead,” Kia said as they sat there for a minute.
“The priests are what got us into this trouble in the first place,” Lucien said.
He left Orpheus and Kia in the car. Orpheus had started to drift away again during the drive to the church, sliding up through the roof. Kia had pulled him back down. She seemed to be the only thing that kept him tethered to this world. Lucien was afraid to touch his son, for fear that he might not be able to.
He looked at the church as he walked over to meet the sorcerer. There were sheets of wood covering the windows, and someone had spray-painted graffiti over the doors, which Lucien assumed were locked. Go Home. There were some holes in the sides of the spire, and the cross at the top of it was bent to the side. He could see light flickering through the holes, and he knew there was an angel inside the church.
“Maybe there was some confusion when we spoke the first time,” Lucien said to the sorcerer. “I wanted a dream that showed an angel’s perspective from the Relics. I wanted people to see what it would be like to live in the highest and holiest buildings on Earth. I didn’t want the apocalypse.”
The sorcerer nodded like he understood. “Maybe the apocalypse is the angel’s perspective,” he said.
“It was supposed to be an ad,” Lucien said.
“It was an ad using an angel. Even I don’t understand them, and I get my powers from them.”
Lucien didn’t know much about sorcerers but he knew they had received their special abilities when the angels had fallen from the Heavens and down to earth all those years ago, after the events of Berlin. Some people had said the world deserved the angels in those first few days after Berlin, but no one said that now.
“There’s a bit of uncertainty built into the process,” the sorcerer added. “We’re still in the early days here.”
“Please don’t say process,” Lucien said.
“We can try again, but I can’t guarantee the results will be any different.”
“What about my son? Can you save my son at least?”
The sorcerer looked up at the church spire and the light emanating from it. “It was the actual angel from the dream?” he asked.
“The very same,” Lucien said. “Did I make it up? Did I bring it into the world somehow?”
The sorcerer shrugged. “I modelled it on an angel I’ve been studying,” he said. “Because that’s how these things work. Maybe there was some sort of connection there.” He sipped his Starbucks. “I wonder if anyone else was visited by it.”
“Just tell me how to save him,” Lucien said. If the sorcerer’s powers were linked to the angels, maybe he could create miracles.
“I imagine you took him to the hospital and the doctors told you there was no hope.”
“Is this the part where I say there’s always hope?” Lucien looked back across the cemetery at the car. The flashes of light from within it were just as strong as the light coming from the church.
“There is hope. Of a sort,” the sorcerer said. “Not the kind the doctors can accept, however. But you have to look at things differently from them. They see the light as an illness, a condition. They look for a cure, but it’s the wrong way of looking.”
“Are you telling me you know what the light is when no one else does?” Lucien asked.
“Of course not,” the sorcerer said, still looking at the spire. “Not even the sorcerers know what the light is. Just because the coming of the angels somehow gave us powers doesn’t mean we understand them any more than you do. For all we know, the angels don’t even know what the light is.”
“Jesus, why am I even here?” Lucien sighed. He looked around at the grave markers. He noticed the dates on them for the first time. 1863–1865. 1862–1869. 1812–1818. They were all the graves of children. They were standing in some sort of children’s cemetery.
“The light comes from the angels, so some find it helpful to use the framework of the divine,” the sorcerer said. “Think of it this way. We live in a fallen world and your child is in the process of leaving it. Call it what you will. Purgatory. Hell. The mortal. The light is freeing him. Some see it as salvation, not an illness.”
Lucien kept staring at the grave markers. He wondered what these children had died of. If they had been freed, where were they now?
“But there is a way of stopping the light,” the sorcerer went on. “I have seen it work in the past. I know children who are still among us because of the actions their parents took. For better or worse.”
“Who do we have to kill?” Lucien asked, forcing a smile.
“Another child may work,” the sorcerer said, looking at him again.
Now Lucien stared at the church. He shook his head, but only a little.
“The light is taking your son,” the sorcerer said. “The only way he can be pulled back is by an act of darkness that is the equivalent. A blood sacrifice. That’s why the doctors don’t talk about it. They can’t trade one life for another. It’s in their code. But parents have different codes.”
“What’s the code of a sorcerer?” Lucien asked. “What’s the code of fucking up the biggest ad campaign in history? What’s the code of telling me to go and murder someone else’s kid?” He found himself pointing at one of the grave markers at his feet, as if the child that lay in the ground there had been murdered in such a fashion.
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we live in a world without codes now,” the sorcerer said.
“I can’t,” Lucien said, turning away from the church. “How would I even ... ?”
“I can tell you what’s worked in the past, but I can’t be an accomplice,” the sorcerer said. “There are laws that apply even to me. I’ve told you the truth, but what you do with it is up to you.”
“And what about the dream?” Lucien asked.
“I just told you how to save your child,” the sorcerer said. “Let’s call it even.”
Both of them looked back up at the spire as an angel appeared in one of the holes in the side of the tower. It was the same angel that had been in Orpheus’s room. Lucien really wished he had the gun in the Range Rover. He didn’t know if bullets would affect the angel or not, but he wanted to find out.
The angel looked down at him as if it knew what he was thinking. Then it took wing, dropping out of the church and soaring over the cemetery. It crossed over them but didn’t look down again. It gazed off into the distance, at who knew what.
“If that’s not a sign, then I don’t know what i
s,” the sorcerer said, but Lucien was already running for the parking lot.
Kia was watching the angel as she hung on to Orpheus. “What did the sorcerer say?” she asked Lucien as he got back in the car.
“He said we have to sacrifice another kid to keep Orpheus here,” Lucien said.
“Is that all?” Kia asked.
* * *
THEY FOLLOWED the angel. Lucien ran red lights and stop signs again to keep up with it, and veered into the oncoming lane to pass slower cars. People honked and yelled at them, but he didn’t pay them any attention. No cops pulled them over this time. The angel hung in the air overhead a few times as they drove, as if waiting for them to catch up, but it never looked back at them.
“What are we going to do when we catch up to it?” Kia asked. She was holding Orpheus all the time now, as he bobbed about in the back like a balloon filled with helium. He’d floated right through his seat belt.
Lucien didn’t have an answer for her. He didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t know why the angel was leading them the way it was, but he figured the sorcerer was right, that it was giving them a sign of something. He’d figure out later exactly what it meant.
“We don’t have much time,” Kia pointed out, pulling Orpheus back down out of the roof again.
Lucien looked at Orpheus in the rear-view mirror. The lines of light had spread even more across his son’s body, and now Lucien could barely stand to look at him he was so bright.
“The angel is my grandfather and you know what that can do to a country but the church will always remain temporal and shiny no matter what the waves wash away from the soul,” Orpheus said as he bumped against the ceiling.
“Oh God,” Kia said.
“God can’t help us,” Lucien said. “God is the problem here.”
“Maybe it was the vitamins I took when I was pregnant,” Kia said. “Maybe it’s your sperm. Do you think your sperm are too old?”
Lucien only slowed his chase of the angel when he saw where it was leading them. It drifted in a circle over Orpheus’s school. As they approached and Lucien let the car drop down to the speed limit, he saw the playground on the other side of the fence topped with razor wire was full of children. It was the recess break. The angel stared down at the children and they screamed and reached up to it or ran and hid under the playground equipment.
“What is it doing?” Kia asked. “Is it going to infect the rest of them?”
Lucien knew it wasn’t going to spread the light to the other children. That’s not why the angel had led them here. He looked at the playground full of children and thought of the cemetery.
The gate to the parking lot opened for them and they drove in and stopped beside the playground, still looking up at the angel circling overhead. It had drifted higher in the sky and looked no bigger than a hawk or some other bird. Many of the children had already lost interest and had returned to chasing each other or going down the slides. Some of those who still paid attention threw sawdust up in the air or punched the sky as if they thought they could strike the angel.
“We could just grab one and go,” Kia said. “Nobody would probably even notice.”
“The other children might notice,” Lucien pointed out. Although when he looked around the playground he saw the children weren’t paying any attention to them at all.
“And what would they say?” Kia asked. “Some grown-ups took a child. It happens every day. They probably couldn’t even describe us properly.”
“The school has cameras,” Lucien said. It was one of the things they paid for, after all.
“What difference does it make if they identify us later?” Kia asked. “Once we’ve saved Orpheus.”
Lucien looked back up at the angel. Is that why it had led them here? Was this some sort of test to see what they were willing to do to save their son? If it was, he didn’t know the correct answer.
And then it was too late anyway as Miss Edge, Orpheus’s teacher, came out of the playground toward them. Lucien got out of the car and walked to meet her before she could see Orpheus in the back seat.
Lucien was convinced that Miss Edge wasn’t her real name, that she’d changed it to sound more authoritative and forceful. He had a number of theories about her real name, but none of those mattered right now.
“It’s quite something, isn’t it?” she asked, looking at him even as she pointed up at the sky. “We’ve had firefighters and police officers visit us before and once even the mayor. But we’ve never had an angel.”
Lucien felt like asking her if they’d ever had a sorcerer visit the school but kept the question to himself.
“What do you suppose it wants?” he said instead.
“Oh, who knows what the angels ever want.” Miss Edge said. “One stood on the roof of my cousin’s house for a full week and never said a word why. All their plants died and their cat ran away and never came back. When it finally left, their entire neighbourhood lost power for a day and the utility company couldn’t figure out what caused it.” She smiled at Lucien. “We missed Orpheus today. Is he sick?”
“He’s just feeling a little ...” Lucien trailed off. He wanted her to supply the illness she wanted to imagine. Then he wouldn’t have to answer any more questions.
But Miss Edge looked past him then. Lucien knew without turning around that her gaze had been drawn by the light in the car. Maybe Orpheus had even drifted through the roof again before Kia could pull him back down.
“Oh no,” she said. The way she said it made Lucien think she really meant it.
“It’s not –” Lucien stopped. “It’s curable. I know how to cure it.”
“I’m so sorry,” Miss Edge said, even as she took a step away from him.
Lucien remembered the first meeting they’d had with Miss Edge in her classroom, when Orpheus had started at the school. They sat on the little children’s chairs around a tiny table. Lucien felt like a giant. He worried the chair might collapse under his weight. They looked at the crayon drawings on the walls. Houses with families outside and dogs and cats and bright yellow suns. Lucien remembered a drawing of an angel among them, but he didn’t know now if it had really been there or if his mind was just making things up after the fact.
“You should have reported this,” Miss Edge said. “When did it happen?”
“We don’t even know what’s happening,” Lucien said. “So how can we say when it happened?” He stopped, then added, “We don’t want the other kids to make fun of him.” It seemed like the sort of thing he should say.
“The other children love Orpheus,” Miss Edge said, but in such a quick way that Lucien suspected it was a standard response to a parent’s concern. “But obviously he can’t come to class anymore.”
Lucien remembered there had been construction paper and crayons on the table during that first meeting with Miss Edge. He’d picked up one of the crayons, a black one, and held it in his hand. He didn’t know when he’d last held a crayon before that. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever taught Orpheus how to colour properly. He wondered if he was somehow to blame for the light.
“It’s not contagious,” Lucien said. “Or we’d have it, too. It’s the angel.” The angel itself was drifting away from the school, as if losing interest in them now that it was clear Lucien and Kia weren’t going to do anything.
“It’s school board policy,” Miss Edge said. “He can’t come back until he has a doctor’s note.”
“A doctor’s note.”
“Saying he’s cured.”
Lucien kept his gaze on the angel. He wondered where it was going now.
“We have to do something,” he said.
“I can make up a lesson plan,” Miss Edge said.
“A lesson plan won’t save him.”
“I’m sorry,” Miss Edge said, then added, “I’m a mother, too.”
That last bit surprised Lucien. He’d never thought of her as a mother. He glanced at her hand but didn’t see a ring. Another sign h
e’d got wrong. Maybe he’d been getting them wrong all along and just hadn’t realized it.
He turned and went back to the Range Rover. He didn’t know what would happen if the angel disappeared on them. He had a feeling that it was the only link to saving Orpheus.
“I’ll pray for you,” Miss Edge said. “I’m not really a believer anymore, but I’ll pray for you.”
“It’s prayer that got us all in this mess in the first place,” Lucien said.
“The effort of the ascent matches only the infinity of the wait to those who have accomplished the inevitable,” Orpheus said as Lucien got back in the car. He was glowing so brightly now that it left spots in Lucien’s vision when he looked away.
“Hush,” Kia said. “Just hush.”
Lucien started the Range Rover and began to drive after the angel even though he still couldn’t see properly.
“Where are we going now?” Kia asked.
“Wherever the angel takes us,” Lucien said. He looked up at the sky but he couldn’t see the angel now. It had become another one of the black spots.
The spots didn’t fade like normal spots in his vision did. He could barely see as he drove toward the exit of the school parking lot. He thought he was all right to drive, as no one else was coming in or out of the parking lot. Then one of the spots turned into a girl running out from between some parked cars and across the lot, right in front of them.
Lucien drove into her before he could stop. The Range Rover shook with a stronger impact than he had imagined possible. He had a glimpse of the girl flying away from them, like the angel had flown through Orpheus’s window. Then the airbag hit him in the face and an explosion of light turned everything white.
It was Orpheus’s voice that brought him back.
“The time is never the time, the end is never the end, the world is never the world,” Orpheus said from the back seat.
Lucien shook his head and suddenly his vision was clear. He saw the crack in the windshield where the airbag must have hit it. The world divided in two. The deflated airbag hung from the steering wheel and lay on his lap. He looked over at Kia and saw her staring in front of the Range Rover even as she continued to hang on to Orpheus. He followed her gaze to the girl lying there, crumpled on the ground.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 24