Ahead I could see Ezekiel and Sparks walking side by side; stepping on nothing, yet nothing was solid. I was afraid to take a step; terrified I might fall, and what’s more, I didn’t feel that I was worthy of taking a single step in His heavenly domain. I wasn’t a human being. I didn’t possess a human soul. I should not have been there and yet there I was.
“You are not truly in Heaven,” Ezekiel said as he motioned for me to follow. “You are seeing what I have seen and nothing more. You are still standing in the middle of a frost-covered sports field at a high school. Come.”
Sparks and I followed the angel up higher and higher until we stood together overlooking everything that could be seen. A wall of imagery stood before us. Thousands upon thousands of images of all of history flashed past until Ezekiel raised a hand and commanded that the entire wall of flashing, twinkling light from a single image. And we saw everything. The War in Heaven, Lucifer and his minions being cast out, the creation of life. All of history blew by faster than you can blink an eye yet every image became seared into my consciousness.
“Now see what has happened,” Ezekiel rumbled. “Look at how they acted against their maker!”
I could see a group of angels chasing down another angel and clubbing it to death. I spotted Jael among them, exhorting the mob to continue its violence against all that stood in their way. There was a flash of brilliant white light and we watched as the gates of Hell were opened for the very first time and the fallen were thrown into the abyss by an unseen force. They thrashed and wailed and called out to God. They begged His forgiveness but there was none to be found. A single voice filled with purpose and resolve harder than diamond bellowed out a command: SECURE THE CHASM AND BRING THE SEAL TO ME.
Another flash of light and we pulled forward past images of ancient civilizations. Hundreds and thousands of years blew past; each vignette carried by the winds of time itself. Then we witnessed groups of angels bickering amongst themselves as the souls of humans; some I recognized as souls that I once claimed meandered about, each wore garments of spun gold and each smiled and greeted one another warmly as they sang out His praise. But what struck me was the look of anger or envy or a combination of both on the faces of angels who watched His most beloved creation going about their business on the streets of heaven. I’d known that Jael and her allies wanted humanity to end. To reunite with the fallen. To bring about a new Heavenly order. I just never realized what that meant until I saw the looks on the faces of His angels: the ones who were supposed to be echoes of His grace.
“Why do they hate humanity, Ezekiel?” I whispered afraid someone might hear me though I knew what I was watching was nothing more than a shadow from the angel’s own memories. “What could human beings have possibly done to elicit looks of disgust on the faces of the creator’s own servants?”
“They all look pissed,” said Sparks. “Right, royally pissed.”
Ezekiel waved a hand and suddenly we were pulled into a room with a ceiling comprised of pure energy that crackled and throbbed with Holy power. Dozens upon dozens of angels grouped together to listen to a disembodied voice called out to each one: make plans for the time will soon be upon us. He has not been seen or heard from in an age. He who is the father to all that ever was and ever will be has taken to His chamber. He is hiding from the truth that surrounds all of us. Heaven is divine. Angels are divine. Humanity is an abomination and He should destroy His pitiful creation. If He will not do it then He must be removed.
Holy shit. There it was.
Angels were calling for open rebellion against their maker. Humanity’s days were numbered if an army of angels decided one day to take matters into their own hands.
“This is happening, Ezekiel? Are angels advocating for the overthrow of God? How is that even possible?”
Ezekiel waved a hand. The vision taken from Ezekiel’s memories disappeared and we were once again standing in the middle of a frost-covered sports field.
“The Lord is not … Himself. He is not who He once was, death-dealer. Do you understand?”
I shook my head. “Not a clue, but I’m trying.”
Sparks glanced at her watch and threw us both a sour look. “We are wasting time with this bullshit. A little girl is missing. She’s been taken by a pair of angels who tried to destroy us at Reaper’s bunker. Now, Ezekiel, enough with the cryptic talk and start spouting the damned truth for once. Where is Charlotte? Do you even know if she’s still alive? Where is she?”
The angel pointed eastward. “Out there you will find her. A lonely old lighthouse at the mouth of the harbour.”
“Devil’s Island?” I nearly spat out the words. “Are you fucking serious? They’ve taken her to Devil’s Island? Please don’t tell me there is some religious symbolism to this.”
The angel nodded and looked slightly ashamed of himself.
“Wait,” said Sparks impatiently. “Why would they have taken Charlotte to Devil’s Island? It’s a murderously rocky shoal at the entrance to the harbour. It’s nothing but rocks and rogue waves and a nearly two-hundred-year-old lighthouse. Unless … oh shit. Please don’t tell me that she’s going to be killed by …”
“Some prick from the dark place,” I said as I threw Ezekiel a menacing glance. “But why kill her in the first place? What is this safe harbour bullshit?”
The angel unfurled his wings and gently lifted off the ground. He gazed down at us; his face was twisted into knots. It was clear he was struggling to tell us everything but he was being kept from doing so, don’t ask me why.”
“He is coming to Charlotte. Soon,” said Ezekiel. “You must keep her alive long enough for His visit. Go now, death-dealer. Go to Devil’s Island and save the child.”
I leapt into the air and tried to grab the angel’s foot to drag him back down to Earth. Naturally, I missed. Instead, I grabbed my Beretta and shot the angel. The bullet ricocheted off his robe.
“I am fucking tired of your heavenly bullshit, Ezekiel! Why the hell do we have to save this kid anyway? If she’s so damned important, why doesn’t she have an angelic bodyguard or something? FUCK!”
Ezekiel shook his head and drifted higher and higher into the air. “This is your task, death-dealer. He has chosen you just as He chose you to expose Jael’s plot. I cannot speak of what is to come because it has so been commanded. He who lit every star in the sky. He who created the very ground on which you both stand has commanded it. Long ago. So long ago. Farewell, death-dealer and Detective Sparks. You will not see me again unless I am summoned.”
And with that riddle-filled missive, the angel took to the sky like a rocket and disappeared. I turned to face Sparks and the look on her face told me precisely what she was thinking.
“What kind of God allows a little child to be used as some kind of pawn? What kind of angel doesn’t offer to save an innocent child’s life?”
I spun around on my heels and began trudging toward Sparks’ SUV. “I’ve been asking myself that question for at least a millennium, Carol. I haven’t figured out the answers yet and I don’t think that I ever will. At least we know where Charlotte is.”
She quickly caught up with me and reached out with her key fob. The lights on her SUV blinked once and she gripped her keys tightly in her right hand. “This is bullshit, Reaper. This is pure bullshit.”
I nodded. “Yup. And we have to save that kid.”
“She might be dead already,” Sparks noted as she stepped over a parking curb and stalked over to her SUV.
I shook my head as I opened the passenger door. “Charlotte is alive, Sparks.”
“How do you know?”
“Because everyone on planet Earth is still alive,” I said grimly as I sat down on the passenger seat and closed the door beside me.
***
At least Charlotte was still breathing.
Ezekiel gave us a glimpse into strife and upheaval in Heaven. I’d have expected Sparks to experience another mind-meltdown after having witnessed the entirety of t
ime and space through Ezekiel’s memories, but I read her wrong. A child was missing. Sparks was the best cop in the city. The only thing that mattered was finding her and getting her to safety.
But nobody was safe.
Ezekiel didn’t explain what was meant by Charlotte being a safe harbour, but I had an inkling or two. I didn’t believe that He wanted her dead – just those around Him. And of course, the douchebags from the dark place wanted the girl dead because of the knowledge she possessed. I stared out the window as street lights blew past. It wouldn’t be too hard to get to Devil’s Island. It was only about ten kilometres from Eastern Passage at the mouth of the harbour as the crow flies; we could easily rent a boat and head out there. Of course, the angels who took the girl would see us coming and could easily manifest a huge wave to flip the boat. I wouldn’t have even put it past them to arrange for a pair of very hungry great white sharks to finish Sparks and me off.
“There’s no element of surprise for us when we head out to Devil’s Island, Sparks,” I said with a hint of dread.
She nodded. “I know.”
I looked at Sparks for a moment; searching her face for any kind of fear because what we were dealing with was terrifying even to me and I’m not human. Not even close. All I saw in the detective’s eyes was a crystal-clear focus. And why not? Sparks lived with danger every single time she set foot out of her house to police the city. I wished that I had one-tenth of her courage because I was shaking in my boots.
“Well, you’re the expert on these kinds of things. How would the city police get out there without being noticed?”
The SUV drove right over a pothole and the entire vehicle shook. “Damn it,” Sparks growled. “We’re dealing with epic powers that have been there since the beginning and you’re wondering how we can get the drop on them? Jeez, Reaper, I thought you had at least a small measure of insight.”
“Good point,” I answered. “One thing that is weird, though.”
“What’s that?”
The SUV shuddered as it went over another pothole. “We’ve both seen what kinds of things Charlotte can do, you’d have thought she would lay waste to those angels or something. I mean, she did manifest a wall of fire and she made a dude disappear just by touching his sorry ass.”
Sparks chewed her lip for a moment as she steered the SUV down a ramp and onto the Circumferential Highway heading to Eastern Passage. “I think Charlotte has some of those heavenly powers. Maybe she’s possessed by a rogue angel and that’s why everyone is after her.”
“Maybe. At this point it doesn’t really matter – we just need to get out to that island,” I said in a tired voice.
“Nobody is going to hire a boat at five-thirty in the morning, Reaper,” said Sparks.
I nodded and glanced at my watch. “Don’t sweat it, I know a guy.”
Sparks snorted. “Does this guy know that he might not get his boat back?”
I chuckled mildly and said, “Let’s leave that out of the discussion when we get there. Head to Eastern Passage – Fisherman’s Cove. The place we’re looking for is called Harry’s by the Sea.”
21
Harry Bogdan is a Bulgarian immigrant who has lived in Eastern Passage ever since he got off the boat at Pier 21 way back in the early 1970’s. When he isn’t fishing, he runs a little pleasure craft touring business at Fisherman’s Cove in Eastern Passage but he’ll generally take anyone anywhere along the Nova Scotia coast if you’ve got enough to pay him. A giant of a man; Haralambi Bogdan, or Harry to his friends is a fixture for tourists who visit the old fishing village because the man is a natural storyteller. With his thick accent and a set of penetrating eyes that seem to bore right through you; Harry is also armed to the teeth when it comes to dealing with things that go bump in the night. He and I go back … way back.
I first met Harry while wearing another man’s skin. The year was 1979 and I’d just gotten off the bus and was looking for work. I’d shambled down to the fishing village because I’d heard that a few operators were looking for lobster crew and I needed some cash, so I knocked on the door to his weathered old shanty overlooking the bay and attempted to bullshit my way into a job. I don’t know whether it was the force of my personality or that Harry was desperate for a good man to work on his lobster boat, but he hired me on the spot and then put me through some rigorous training on how to become a lobster fisherman. (I failed his training but won his respect when I addressed the issue of a soulless serial killing son of a bitch who’d just taken up residence in Eastern Passage. The cops found the guy floating in the bay with a large dent in the back of his head due to a close encounter with a lead pipe and yours truly.)
I hadn’t talked to Harry in more than thirty years, but I had an old communist-era Leva coin that Harry had given me before I jumped into another host. He’d know it was me. Probably.
We arrived at Fisherman’s Cove just before six in the morning. A few lobster fishermen were busily preparing their traps for a jaunt out along the coast and I saw a light shining inside Harry’s weathered old shanty. Sparks parked the SUV in the public parking lot and we walked quietly up the boardwalk.
The old man was pushing a light dusting of snow across the boardwalk in front of his shack with a broom. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a Melmac coffee cup hanging off a belt loop by a short length of nylon cord. He stood a good six foot four and he still had broad shoulders despite his advancing age. I’d have pegged him at around eighty years old but it was hard to tell from looking at his face because of his enormous grey beard which spread out in both directions across his cable-knit sweater and fluttered in the early morning breeze.
“Not open for another three hours,” he said, taking the last drag off his cigarette. He tossed the butt into the salt water ten feet below his dock. “Come back when the sun is up.”
I stepped onto the freshly swept boardwalk. His boat, The Troubadour was bobbing up and down with each wave that rolled in. “Hello, Harry,” I said as I pulled my own cigarette out of its pack and slipped it between my lips. “You’ve got to be at least eighty now. I can tell you how much longer you’ve got if you want.”
The old man returned his broom to a hand-carved wooden rack attached to the front of his shack. He turned around and gazed at me for a few seconds and he squinted in the darkness.
“You, I do not know,” he said, digging his boots into the dock. He still cut an imposing figure even at his advanced age. I would put him up against a neo-Nazi thug any day of the week and they’d have to scrape that thug off the pavement. “The woman … I do not know her either.”
I took a deep haul off my cigarette and said, “August 1979. I got off the bus and you gave me a job. You killed a minion of some kind that was feeding on the deer in the hills overlooking the bay. Crossbow. We burned its carcass and you told me the monsters came over from the old country through stories and song. You said all those stories and legends gave them actual power to manifest here in this place. Do you remember me now?”
He leaned forward and appeared to squint harder. “You are related to … to Waxman?”
I nodded as he recognized the fake name I’d used up until I destroyed my former host back at the bunker. “I am Waxman, well, it’s Richter now. This here is Detective Sergeant Carol Sparks. We’re investigating something that you would understand because you’ve seen the darkness and you know its name. We need to get to Devil’s Island. I’ll pay you a hundred bucks and a bottle of Screech if you can get us there with no questions asked.”
He flashed me a fiery glare. “You are not Waxman. You are maybe one of his enemies. Maybe an undercover cop, yeah? I have nothing to say to either of you!”
He turned around and was about to head back into his shack when I pulled the Bulgarian communist-era Leva out of my pocket and tossed it at his feet. “You gave me this and I’m giving it back. I don’t have time to fuck around explaining that I am death incarnate and I hop from body to body, Harry. You will meet your end in
six years, three months and fourteen days. You will develop lung cancer and you will take your boat out into international waters. You will have a last shot of Rakia and a cigarette before you jump into the frigid water in late February and let hypothermia take you. Not a bad way to go, all told. Should be painless. You’ll just fall asleep and drift away.”
The old man knelt to pick up the coin. He examined it closely and held it out for all to see. “I might now be an old man but I do remember this is the very coin I gave a man called Waxman many years ago. You seem to be a mind reader because I have long planned my exit that way. Perhaps I told Waxman how I would like to go out and maybe he passed it on to you.”
I could hear Sparks’ teeth grating together. She stepped forward and flashed her badge. “A little girl has been abducted and we have reason to believe that she’s being kept on Devil’s Island. I don’t want to have to commandeer your boat but if you won’t take us out there, I’m fully prepared to do it.”
Bogdan ran a large callous-encrusted hand through his thick grey beard. His dark brown eyes drifted between Sparks and me for a few seconds. He opened his mouth to say something and then took one last look at the coin I’d returned.
The Girl On Victoria Road: A Tim Reaper Novel Page 18