The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  It was raining much harder. The village drummed in the down­pour, the hills huddled in a blanket of mist. The river roared. The cobweb spray, which had drenched the car and made it so hard to start when Harry left the cottage, had become a deluge. The night was very dark. The streets were deserted. Harry stepped into the middle of the road and stood there until his jacket was heavy with water, until his hair was plastered to his skull. The rain ran behind his ears and into the collar of his shirt; it trickled into the small of his back, between his buttocks, among the coils of hair in his groin. Then, when he was so wet that there was no reason to try and shelter, he strolled through the village. The toad slept in his pocket.

  It would be easy to find where Sarah lived. She’d only said that she used a caravan in her uncle’s garden, but Harry was sure he could locate her. He crossed the bridge, walked the pavement to the restaurant where she worked, and, in the orange blur of a street-lamp, he again reflected on the painting she’d done. It streamed with rain, gleaming as though it were freshly varnished, and the glare made it hard to see all the picture at once. Harry angled his head this way and that, trying to see the prince’s face. More importantly, he squinted for the name of Sarah’s uncle.

  ‘Proprietor: Alf Butterfield,’ it said in one corner of the paint­ing, the letters just big enough to read in a pool of blood. Good: not a Jones or a Williams or a Roberts. The address should be easy to find in a telephone directory.

  So Harry splashed to the telephone kiosk, which was outside the post office in the middle of the village, and stepped inside it. Most of the windows were broken and every inch of space was covered with obscene graffiti, much of it misspelt. But the kiosk was brightly lit and the directory was intact. In a moment, he’d found the only A. Butterfield in Beddgelert and noted the address: a house nearby. He slammed the directory shut. But suddenly, shivering in his cold, drenched clothes, knowing that the girl he wanted was so close to him and yet so far out of reach, he felt his confidence draining away.

  What would he do if he found her? What could he say, after his humiliation on the cliffs? What would he do if Patrick, the bare­footed climber, was there?

  The stimulus of alcohol was deserting him. His body was frail and sticklike, trembling and brittle. His schoolteacher clothes were sodden. His glasses were broken.

  Why had he come this far? What was he going to do next?

  Leaning in the glare of the kiosk, surrounded by a teeming black night, he peered through the shattered lens of his glasses, through the shattered windows of the telephone box. Everything was blurred. His face was a distorted reflection of ill-matching splin­ters, a jigsaw of blank and bloodless features and a mat of drip­ping, gingery hair. The tension in his belly and his fractured vision spawned the first of the sparks in the corner of his right eye . . . the angel, a beautiful, bright angel bringing pain and wretchedness for Harry Clewe. He groaned horribly at the sight of it. He whipped off his glasses and clawed at his eyeballs, as though he might tear them out and extinguish the sparks forever. But the sparks wouldn’t shift. The angel had come for him again.

  He groped into his pocket, put the heavy bundle of the spotted red neckerchief on top of the telephone directory and unfolded it. There was the toad, its eyes closed tightly, locking the magic inside the potato ugliness of its head. With quivering hands, Harry picked it up . . . and the surge of strength it gave him was lovelier than morphine, the blotting paper of pain. His moaning became less feverish. He caressed the toad and blew softly on its skin. The moment it slid open the golden eyes, Harry was flooded with warmth. The jewel was unlocked.

  The natterjack stretched itself awake in his hands. He held it to his forehead and pressed it there. It writhed on his skin, cool and dry and comforting. With his eyes squeezed shut, he fused his jumbled thoughts into a single image of the golden girl in his golden garden. Sarah, oh Sarah, oh Sarah . . . His fingers burned with the heat of her skin, as the toad swelled up. His head was on fire. Sarah, oh Sarah, oh Sarah . . . He smothered the toad to his face.

  Until his knees buckled. He crumpled to the floor. Fireworks ex­ploded in his head, his eyeballs rolled, his ears jangled with bells . . .

  Real bells. The telephone was ringing.

  Harry squealed. He opened his eyes, stood up and slapped the toad onto the directory. His vision had cleared and, as always, the disappearance of the sparks brought the first pulse of pain to his head. Snatching the neckerchief, he covered the toad with it. The ringing continued, harsh and loud in the brightness of the kiosk. Simply to stop the noise, Harry picked up the receiver and automatically put it to his ear.

  ‘Who is it?’ he croaked.

  A voice said, ‘What are you doing in there?’

  Harry leaped from the receiver as though it had scalded his ear. He whirled round and round inside the kiosk. Through the broken windows, everything was black, streaming with black rain. When he thrust his glasses onto his face again, he could see lights in nearby houses, the ghostly flicker of televisions. Someone was drawing the curtains in an upstairs room. With the blood beating in his temples, unable to resist the magnetism of the telephone, he picked up the receiver and whispered into it.

  ‘Who are you? Where are you? Can I see you?’

  There was silence. The curtains shifted in another house. A light went off further down the street. Then the voice came again. It was a woman.

  ‘No, you can’t see me. But I can see you. I’ve been watching you. Are you sick or something? Are you mad?’

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  He banged the phone down. Under the neckerchief, the toad was swollen as though it might burst into a thousand shreds of rubbery skin. Hurriedly, he thrust it into his pocket. Then he flung himself from the kiosk and ran as fast as he could along the pavement. Every lighted window he passed, every twitch of a curtain, was a torment to him. Slowing down, he had the presence of mind to note one of the houses as the address he’d found in the directory, and he saw the white mass of a caravan in the garden; no light in it, just a single lighted room upstairs in the house itself.

  He sprinted on to where the car was dry in the dense shelter of the yew. As carefully as if he were handling a piece of antique glass, he placed the toad on the passenger seat. In the gloom, he could see it slowly relaxing, deflating until it was wrinkled and flabby again and its golden eyes were shut. Harry relaxed, too. To try and still his hammering head, he leaned out of the car door and inserted two fingers to the back of his throat. He retched noisily, barking like a dog, as he’d learned to retch when he was a little boy, and lost all the beer with a khaki-coloured stew he’d had at midday. At last, at the seventh or eighth churning attempt, the car started. He drove out of the waterlogged valley and into the waterlogged hills, parking under the cover of the shed.

  For a few more minutes he sat in the darkness and listened as the rain drummed on the corrugated-iron roof, as the big, hot engine ticked and cooled, and then he went into the cottage.

  ‘You deserve a night off,’ he said to the natterjack, when he went upstairs to bed.

  Instead of putting the toad in the ceiling with the string around its belly, he made a nest for it with the neckerchief in the drawer of his bedside table. That night, the rats could have the run of the roof. He was too tired to worry about them. He stripped, dried himself on a towel and climbed into bed. Utterly drained, Harry Clewe fell straight away into a deep sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  Three mornings later, Harry drove into Caernarfon to have his glasses repaired.

  He’d done very little since his dismissal from the hotel. He wrote to Lizzie, his beloved sister, who was recovering slowly and painfully at home after her riding accident, but he didn’t mention Sarah, nor the natterjack toad. He hoped very much that Lizzie would write back. He walked the woods and the hills, with the toad inside his shirt. Under the birch trees there was the fly agaric with its fairy-tale red umbrella; in the pine forest, the gagging pungency of stinkhorn. Tho
usands of acorns choked the roadside gutters. It was a harvest-time for the grey squirrels, which raced overhead in the sunlit oak branches. The jays were the bandits of the woodland, moustachioed and brazen. A barn owl, hunting in bright daylight over an open field, drifted and feinted like a moth, plunging into a clump of long grass; then it rose, with something squirming in its talons. A cormorant fished on Llyn y Gadair, the lake by his cottage, low in the water, lethal and black as a sub­marine. In the woods, Harry sat down and took the toad out of his shirt. He put it into the leaf mould for a feast of lice and ants and the delicate little snails whose shells it crunched like breakfast cereal.

  But, because of his shattered glasses, the branches and their re­maining leaves were a twinkling blur, through which the jays and the squirrels moved like ghosts. The only thing that stayed in focus, close to him both physically and in spirit, was the toad. He was delighted, then, to have his lens repaired. It meant that, ostensibly, he was another step closer to a complete recovery from his fall.

  To celebrate his improved visibility, Harry gulped a couple of pints of beer in the Black Boy and then drove from Caernarfon as fast as the car would go. He knew the road well. All the world was lovely, sparkling in the glassy autumn air. The car sprang out of town and into the hills, the exhaust crackling so loudly that the sheep stampeded in the fields. There was a hot smell of burning oil and a trailing haze of blue smoke, so that Harry wondered how much longer the Wabenzi power would be with him. Faster and faster he travelled, foot hard down. He’d taken the toad out of his shirt and set it on the dashboard, where it blinked grimly and squatted against the howl of cold air.

  A familiar vehicle came into sight ahead of him. He closed rapidly on it. It was Patrick’s van. Unable to overtake through a series of narrow bends, Harry found his long red bonnet almost nudging the van’s battered back door. Then he braked and dropped away at the sight of Sarah’s helmet of golden hair, which swivelled until he could see her face dimly through the gloom of the window. It was his first glimpse of her since the day he’d been climbing.

  Patrick must have seen the car in his mirror and said something to the girl, for she raised a hand and waved. Harry flashed his headlamps in reply, and, at this, the van accelerated so sharply that its tyres squealed on the twisting turns of the road. Harry’s heart began to thump. He squeezed the throttle enough to bring his car close to the van again. The road straightened, although it was still quite narrow. Harry drew back while the van laboured noisily in front of him; it was hard to have a view from the left-hand-drive car. Seeing there was no oncoming traffic, he flashed his headlamps again, pulled out and floored the accelerator. The car gathered itself like a tomcat and shot forwards.

  Level with the van, driver’s door to driver’s door, Harry had a split-second’s view of Patrick’s grinning face, and there was Sarah as well, leaning across to wave . . . Her mouth opened and closed. Her eyes flickered with alarm. Concentrating on the road, Harry realised that Patrick had swung out deliberately to try and stop him from overtaking. A telegraph pole flashed close to his offside wing. His tyres were in the loose gravel of the verge. A bank of brambles lashed the length of the car. At this, the toad sprang from the dashboard. The impact was breathtaking. All its turnip-weight landed in Harry’s groin.

  Gasping, his eyes tingling, he twitched the car through the narrowing gap. He held the accelerator to the floor and the blue van shrank in his mirror. It disappeared in a comet trail of burnt oil.

  Harry bellowed with excitement. He’d seen Sarah! He’d left the rock-climber labouring in his slipstream! The toad, landing in his groin, had given him the strength when he’d needed it. He had all the power and magic he’d ever craved!

  Gradually he slowed down so that he could put the toad on the dashboard again. He wondered if Patrick and Sarah had seen it, lumped on the spotted red neckerchief. He didn’t mind if they had: it wasn’t a secret. The hotel manager had seen it, and so had an anony­mous woman from a window overlooking the telephone kiosk in Beddgelert. Now Harry had seen Sarah again and he knew where she lived. Moreover, he had the toadstone, locked in the natterjack’s head. He must use it while the power was good and while there was time.

  It was the end of September. Soon the girl would be returning to London.

  Chapter Eleven

  Harry sat in his garden until the evening grew dark and cool. It was a still, dry night. The sky was deep blue. Venus was bright over Hebog. A toenail moon shivered on the horizon of black moun­tains. There was a shuffle and click of hunters in the under­growth, in the leaning branches of the ash tree: the hedgehog, turning pebbles for a meal of snails; the zigzagging of bats, folding a leathery wing. And the toad was alive with the coming of night.

  Harry put on a navy-blue pullover and dark-grey trousers. He took off his tennis shoes and stepped into his Wellington boots. Like the hedgehog, the bat and the toad, he was wide awake in the twilight. He would learn from the toad, to be a slow, silent hunter, as patient as the stones it resembled, deliberate and unhurried in his movements. That was the way it worked: no dash, no thrilling chase, but a prehistoric slow motion. This time, he wouldn’t make the mistake of exposing himself in the light of a telephone kiosk. He was ready, in his dark clothing, to match the deepening shadows.

  He drove slowly towards Beddgelert. There were no headlamps but his own; Harry and the toad were alone beneath the mass of Snowdon. The mountain road plunged into the valley, where the world was darker and darker, where he stopped in the pitchy gloom of the yew tree.

  Leaving the car, he walked quickly along the pavement, moving in the deepest shadows of bushes and hedges, avoiding the orange glow of the streetlamps. He had no plan. With the heavy bulge of the toad in his trouser pocket, he determined only to try and see Sarah again, perhaps to talk to her if Patrick wasn’t there. Simply to be with her and see the spark in her grey gull’s eyes, the supple­ness of her throat and her hands . . . His bowels loosened at the thought. As he walked past the glare of the telephone kiosk, he shuddered to remember his exposure inside it. The village was quite silent, apart from a tinkling of laughter from the hotel bar. He glimpsed the blue-grey burning of televisions in softly lit living rooms. In a minute he could see the house and the caravan he was looking for. He tiptoed closer, fondling the toad in his pocket. It was stretching its legs in the folded neckerchief.

  Harry stopped in the coal-black shadow of a horse chestnut. The house was directly opposite him, with a downstairs room brightly lit; probably the kitchen, with the window steamed up. Some­one was moving around inside the room, Sarah’s uncle, burly and heavily bearded, drifting dimly here and there like a great fish in a muddy aquarium. The caravan, a white tourer, was parked in the front garden; there was a light inside it. Harry leaned on the horse chestnut, quite giddy with the idea that the girl was there. His throat tightened and his scalp prickled. Better still, there was no sign of Patrick’s van. With a sudden surge of confidence triggered by the stirrings of the toad in his pocket and the almost unbearable proximity of the girl, Harry crossed the road and strode towards the house. He stopped at the garden gate, out of sight of the kitchen window, and stared at the light inside the caravan. And there she was.

  The window was perfectly clear. Against the surrounding dark­ness, it was like watching the girl on film; the big square screen was in focus and full of colour. She was sitting down, with a magazine open on the table in front of her, wearing the short-sleeved white blouse she’d worn in the restaurant, still with the pen and notebook in her breast pocket. Probably she had the blue skirt on as well, and the white socks. She frowned as she read, then quickly riffled the pages. Her hair fell down and hid her face as she leaned to look closely at a photograph, and when she sat up straight again she pushed it from her forehead with a smart flick of her fingers. Harry’s stomach turned over at the flex of her brown, bare arm. Swallowing hard, he was about to step forward and approach the caravan door, when he saw her shut the magazine and turn her face to the w
indow. She stared straight at him.

  He froze, his chest pounding. Then he realised that she couldn’t see him. From inside the caravan, the windows were black mirrors in which she’d see nothing but her own reflection. That was what she was looking at, although she seemed to be gazing directly into Harry’s eyes. She examined her hair, bunching it tightly behind her head with both her hands. She angled her face this way and that, and Harry could see her tiny white ears and her brown neck. He gasped at a glimpse of the marbled whiteness under her arms; his throat ached at the tautening of her breasts against the schoolgirl’s blouse. She let go of her hair and shook it loose. Coming very close to the glass, she inspected the corner of her nostril where the spot had been: the redness was almost gone. She bared her teeth at Harry, snarling like a stoat, and finally, seeing that she was pretty and young and irresistible, she licked her lips with a pink, wet tongue, winked at herself and then giggled with one hand to her mouth.

  Charged with desire, Harry strode across the lawn towards her. The girl spoke to her own reflection . . . so that, puzzled by this, Harry stopped in the middle of the lawn. In answer to whatever the girl had said, Patrick sat up behind her.

  The magic of the toadstone deserted Harry Clewe at that moment. The rock-climber’s appearance was so sudden and unexpected that Harry’s mind went blank. He was stranded on the lawn. There were no shadows to hide him. Patrick stood up, tousled and frowning and fiercely bearded, and moved from the caravan window to the door. The handle turned. He was coming out. Unable to retrace his steps to the safety of the street, Harry dashed forward and dived headlong underneath the caravan.