by Bruce Blake
“I think we’re okay,” I said, ear pressed against the door. My angel-friend didn’t answer. “Piper?”
I pivoted from the door and found her staring across the room. I expected to see we’d found refuge in a storage closet, but my expectation was incorrect. Instead, we’d entered an office. I’d never heard of anyone keeping an office off a boys’ locker room, but I also wouldn’t have expected to find a locker room at the bottom of stairs normally leading to a subway platform or a dog-fighting pit behind the door of a doctor’s office waiting room, either. Seems Hell is full of surprises.
I took in the office with a quick glance: a four-drawer metal filing cabinet stood against one wall, basketballs of different brands filled a rolling rack nearby. A box in one corner over-flowed with whiffle balls and the scoops for throwing them; orange mesh pull-over tops used for differentiating teams spilled over the side of a second, smaller box, tossed in by careless hands. A simple desk with two drawers sat against the far wall, a man at it perched on the edge of a wooden desk chair, his back to us. He didn’t seem to notice we’d entered.
I stepped up beside Piper and she raised her hand, stopping me. She extended a finger toward the desk, pointing out the one thing I hadn’t noticed: a closed-circuit television.
It looked like one which might have been found performing security duty in a 7/11 sometime in the eighties, the screen no more than twelve inches across, the picture in grainy black and white. I couldn’t tell what was on the screen from where we stood, so we edged closer, trying not to betray our presence. After a few steps, I saw multiple figures moving around on the screen but still couldn’t tell who or what, nor get an inkling of where the camera on the other end might be. Intent on the screen, the man didn’t notice us.
Piper must have realized what he watched before I did because she averted her gaze, put her hand on my chest to stop me from getting any closer and shook her head. A spark flared in my heart at her touch but I brushed her hand aside and took two more steps, less concerned about the man noticing my presence after seeing her reaction.
The picture cleared: the boys in the locker room. Most of them were shirtless, changing out of their gym clothes; a few had already stripped to hit the showers, also clearly in view of the camera’s placement. One boy stood at the center of the locker room, staring up at the camera as if he looked through it and out the other side.
I looked away and into the face of the man for the first time. He was older than I remembered; his hair had receded a few inches from his forehead, contacts replaced the wire-rimmed glasses he’d worn. He stared intently at the screen, an unsettling look on his face.
“Tony?”
He didn’t hear me. The wooden chair creaked beneath him as he leaned forward awkwardly, getting a better look, and I noticed his arms were tied to the chair. He licked his lips and leaned back, his eyes flickering down to his lap. My gaze followed his to the bulge in his red gym shorts with white stripes down the side. He looked back up to the screen and I recognized the unsettling look on his face as a mix of desire and desperation—a staple of Hell’s punishments.
My stomach did a somersault, anger and disgust exploding in my chest. My foot lashed out kicking the edge of the chair and sending it skittering across the room on squeaky wheels.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
The man who was once my youth soccer coach—and who also coached my son—looked up, surprised. It made me angrier to see he didn’t seem to have any guilt mixed in his expression.
“Who are you?”
I clamped my teeth together, grinding my molars.
“Ric Fell,” I said, anger compressing my name. A sliver of pain shot up my broken arm as my hands balled into fists. I ignored it in favor of righteous rage. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Icarus? Oh my God. Icarus! Those men told me you’d come. Are you here to save me?”
His words caught me off-guard: those men told me you’d come, but I ignored their implications for the time-being.
“What’s going on here?”
He glanced at the small screen then at himself. Guilt finally made an appearance on his face, though I’m sure being caught caused it, not his actions. He pulled at his arms, showing me they were tied down as if to say it wasn’t his fault. I didn’t think for a second the ropes were meant to keep him in front of the video feed—he obviously enjoyed watching—but to keep his hands out of his lap. Another sickened feeling rose from my belly into my throat.
“Help me.”
I pulled my uninjured arm back, hand open, fully intending to slap the man silly, but Piper caught my wrist before I let loose, the prickling shock of her touch interrupting me. I turned toward her.
“This is Hell, Icarus. The man is being punished already.”
“Not enough.”
“We can’t stay. Bring him or leave him, but we have to go.”
Piper’s expression remained placid, neutral. She really didn’t care whether or not we brought him. I looked back at the man lashed to the chair and caught his eyes flickering back to me from the screen. The urge to punch him welled up again but I lowered my arm: Piper was right, the longer we hung around, the worse things might potentially get. I hadn’t forgotten Tony’s comment about ‘those men’ or the way the gargoyles had kept their eyes on us. Neither seemed a good sign.
I tried to sort through the situation. On the one hand, I’d come here to bring back the souls I was responsible for sending to Hell, Tony McSweeny among them. But I didn’t expect to find this.
He coached my son.
I struggled my anger back into place and tried to remain logical. On our last visit to Hell, I’d watched Beth kill her children, an act I knew didn’t happen in the real world. Just because he was strapped to a chair watching teenage boys undress and shower didn’t mean he did the same thing in life.
Did it?
It would be easier to convince myself if he didn’t keep glancing back at the monitor.
“Icarus,” Piper prompted.
“Alright.”
I untied my former soccer coach. He flinched and sucked air in through his teeth as I pulled the ropes away, purposely doing it in an un-gentle fashion in case he deserved it.
“Thank you,” he said as he stood.
“You ended up in Hell because of me, Tony,” I said doing my best to sound threatening. “I better not get you out of here to find you really should have spent the rest of eternity dry-humping the inside of your own jeans.”
“You won’t,” he said shaking his head. “I don’t know what all this was about. Thank you.”
I shook off his thanks and moved to the door. Piper had already opened it a crack to peek through.
“We can’t go that way,” I said casting a look over my shoulder at Tony. “Wouldn’t be right.”
“It’s empty.”
A quick glance at the monitor confirmed that no boys remained in the locker room. Removing Tony from the chair dispelled his punishment.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
Piper led the way out the door and I shuffled Tony out behind her. We made it a couple of steps out of the small office before stopping. The room we stepped into wasn’t the locker room, but the subway platform I’d originally expected.
And a subway train was pulling up to the station.
“Crap.”
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Eleven
The group of people did precious little milling for a crowd its size. Trevor stood off to the side, separated from the group, watching them as they stared at the unbroken stained-glass window. A wide variety of people made up the crowd: the youngest looked to be a five-year-old strapped into one of those dog-leash like contraptions as his mother whispered prayers toward the miraculous glass; the oldest must have been giving ninety a run for its money. Men, women and a number of different ethnicities. The one thing they might have in common was their faith—if this window survived the explosion, it must surely
be a testament to God’s power.
If they only knew.
He only remembered glimpses of what happened within the church’s walls as he’d spent most of his last visit here thankfully unconscious. What he did remember kept him awake most nights. Being fifteen and having been party to a battle between archangels as well as having one almost steal your soul would give anyone nightmares.
Trevor shuffled his feet and looked away from the crowd. The yellow police tape ringing the devastated church in a rough circle flapped in the breeze and he had the uneasy feeling it gestured to him, beckoned. He stepped off the sidewalk onto the damp grass and circled around to the far side, under the branches of the oak tree, away from the miracle-seekers. A little after seven p.m., winter’s shortened days made it fully dark. When he reached the spot directly opposite the window, Trevor ducked under the police tape and approached the ruins.
Chunks of broken stone wall littered the blackened grass. He hadn’t been here when the explosion happened, but even unconscious, he’d felt the power of the archangels enough that the extent of the destruction didn’t surprise him. He stepped past charred pews and over a chunk of marble which may once have been part of the altar, though he knew too little of religion and its trappings to say for sure. His father always insisted on not going to church. Funny he’d lost his life in this very churchyard and Trevor came so close to losing his here, too.
Coincidence?
The rubble formed a small mount in the middle of the former church and Trevor climbed to the top, picking his way nimbly from stone to chunk of wood to another stone. Each step brought a memory which couldn’t possibly be his: Icarus fighting a man covered in scars and blood; Poe lying unconscious amongst flames; two brawny men he knew to be archangels locked in a battle, one with a flaming sword, one with a sword of shadow; and finally Icarus carrying him in his arms, taking him away.
Trevor reached the top of the pile and gazed down in disbelief—the church appeared whole again, each pew in place with copies of the bible and hymnals in their places in the compartments on their backs. Tapestries which had been burned to ash hung on the walls near the altar, the organ sat ready to play. He looked around, taking it all in, the re-formed building lit by a dim glow.
The pile of rubble under Trevor’s feet had been replaced by red carpeting as he stood in the middle of the church’s main aisle near the altar as though awaiting the opportunity to give away the bride. He knew each part of the church had a name—he'd watched enough TV and seen enough movies to know that—but he never remembered the nave from the chancel. It never seemed important.
He moved toward the stained glass window depicting the Virgin Mary, on the other side of which he knew a crowd watched. The only thing which looked out of place in the church was the charred pew leaning against the wall beneath the window. Trevor reached it and looked at it curiously. The wood was blackened but not turned to charcoal; chunks torn from the wood formed handholds and steps. He leaned against it, testing the strength of the pew, and finding it solid, placed his foot in the first divot.
The wood creaked beneath Trevor’s weight but didn’t buckle as he climbed toward the stained glass without knowing why he did. He wanted to stop and chastised himself for falling prey to the same mania as the crowd gathered on the sidewalk to see the miracle window, but each step closer filled him with more excitement. Inexplicably, he wanted nothing more than to be close to the woman in the glass, the Virgin Mary.
He reached the top of the pew and stopped, the bench wobbling slightly under him. The window ledge looked wide enough to accommodate his feet so he stepped onto it, bracing himself against the sides to keep his balance. His face was on the same level with the savior’s mother’s face, his eyes staring into hers.
Half-a-minute passed before he felt the heat at his back. A gentle, comfortable heat, like the sun warming his skin while lying on a beach. After a moment, he realized a light accompanied it, growing brighter and brighter, and a smell: apple pie, cinnamon, cloves. Trevor stood, arms spread, and leaned his head back, basking in the glow until it overtook him, filled him, leaving nothing in his world but light and warmth.
†‡†
The man raised his eyes from his whispered prayer, asking for his father’s health back, for God to forgive him whatever he’d done and take away the pancreatic cancer leeching the life out of him. He didn’t know why he’d stopped mid-prayer to glance up at the miracle window but he’d suddenly, inexplicably felt the need. He saw from the corner of his eye that the man beside him—the one praying for his baby grandson born prematurely—had done the same, and the woman in front of him with her child in a harness.
They stared at the window together, along with the rest of the congregation, as a glow gathered behind it, dim at first, then brightening.
“Dear God,” the man whispered, adding to the murmur of the crowd.
The light grew brighter, the colored panes glowed brilliantly, mesmerizing him. Then the shadow appeared around the Virgin, an outline of a man standing behind her, arms outstretched as if to embrace her.
“Oh my Lord,” the man said, louder this time.
The others added their own exclamations.
“The light...”
“It’s so beautiful...”
“My God.”
“Jesus Christ,” the woman with her boy on a leash screeched suddenly, startling the man. “It’s Jesus.”
The light brightened until it blotted out the colors of the window and the shape of the Virgin Mary, brightened until only the outline of the man remained, a dark shadow-crucifixion framed in the window.
Then the light went out.
The man blinked and saw the shape every time his lids closed, the image temporarily burned into his retinas, the memory etched indelibly in his memory and his soul. Tears spilled down his cheeks and he pushed through the crowd, desperate to call his father and see how he felt.
†‡†
Trevor opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling: white, plain, a cobweb dangling in one corner. Could be any ceiling, but not the ceiling of his bedroom—no Lamb of God poster pinned over the bed. He sat up, half-expecting it to be a struggle and his body full of aches and pains. It wasn’t.
A quick glance around the room and he realized he was in a motel room: generic dresser, nondescript art on the walls and possibly the last remaining tube TV in the known universe. Knowing his locale did little to ease his nerves.
A sound caught Trevor’s attention: running water. He shifted on the bed and looked toward the bathroom door which stood ajar half-an-inch, a sliver of light shining through. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, not sure whether he intended to creep to the bathroom door and attempt to see who was behind it, or if he would creep right on by, out the front door and find his way home.
Before he stood, the decision was wrested from him.
The bathroom door swung open and a man stepped through—tall and broad, big by any standards, and wearing a black shirt open at the throat, black dress pants and a red blazer. His blond hair hung past his shoulders and he held a hand towel, drying his hands after washing.
“Ah, you’re awake,” the man said and smiled. His white teeth and golden eyes glimmered.
Trevor nodded once in reply but said nothing. He felt a familiarity about the man, like he’d met him before, but it eluded him. A friend of his Mom’s? A parent of a classmate? Neither option felt right.
Then who?
The man tossed the towel over the worn arm of the desk chair and spread his arms in a welcoming gesture.
“You look confused, Trevor. Don’t you remember me?”
The teenager looked at him for a full minute, scouring his memory while discovering nothing but the feeling you get when you hear a song and know the title but can’t quite fish it out of the bowels of your brain. Finally, he shook his head.
“I’m not surprised, really. You weren’t in the best condition last time we met.” The man crossed the last two p
aces to stand in front of Trevor, hand extended expectantly. “I’m Michael.”
Trevor’s eyes widened and he sucked a whistling breath in through his teeth.
The archangel.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Twelve
Boarding a subway car in Hell didn’t seem like the best idea. I’d seen too many horror flicks and read too many stories in which shitty things happen to people who ride subways: Jacob’s Ladder, The Midnight Meat Train, Another Man’s Shoes and a whole raft of others. Subways are famous for providing havens for demons and ghouls of all sorts.
Piper took a step toward the train’s open doors.
“I don’t know, Pipe.”
“We don’t have much choice.”
I looked up and down the platform. The subway station ended in a blank wall at each end of the train with no doors, windows, alcoves or flights of stairs in between. Not so much as a line of graffiti marred the white surface; the door through which we’d come was gone. It seemed my angel friend was correct in her assessment.
“This place is fucked,” I commented, not really intending to do so aloud. Piper looked at me and raised a sarcastic half-smile.
“No kidding, Sherlock.”
“The phrase is ‘no shit, Sherlock’.”
“Whatever.”
Tony looked nervous standing between us. His eyes darted side to side as he shifted from one foot to another like a kid who needed to pee. “Can we get out of here, guys. I got a bad feeling.”
“There’s nowhere else to go,” Piper said taking a half-step toward the doors.
“That’s what worries me.” I breathed deep, collecting myself as the other two watched, awaiting a plan. How a guy like me ended up being the leader of a rescue team making their way through Hell is beyond me. Actually, I know exactly how it happened, but that still didn’t make it a good idea.