The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  It was colder up the Nantgwynant valley. The summit of Snowdon loomed jagged and grey, snagged with mist. The sun was low, spangling in the sunburst of the broken windscreen and the sunburst of Harry’s broken glasses. He crawled behind an ancient bus. The road was very steep and narrow, climbing between dry-stone walls, and it was impossible to overtake, impossible to see ahead from the left-hand-drive car. He had to wait, almost nudging the back of the bus with his bonnet. The car didn’t like crawling. Harry wrinkled his nose at the smell of burning oil. He tapped at the temperature gauge and the oil-pressure gauge, alarmed to see smoke from under the dashboard. Up and up the valley he crawled, caught behind the toiling bus, wafting with his hands as more and more and denser smoke came billowing into his face. The toad blinked its golden eyes and flexed its legs on the red neckerchief, as though it might jump away from the acrid fumes.

  At last the road was wider, near the top of the pass, and Harry pulled out to make sure the way ahead was clear. There was room and time to overtake, although he could hardly see through the shattered, sun-dazzled windscreen. He slammed the throttle to the floor.

  The car shuddered from end to end. It gathered itself, missed and missed and then suddenly surged forwards. Smoke erupted from the exhaust – Bang! Bang! Bang! – and a cloud of smoke blew out of the dashboard.

  As the car broke over the crest of the pass, and the bus was swallowed in a choking blue haze, two things happened at once. There was a tremendous, muffled explosion – something burst so violently that the Wabenzi bonnet bulged and buckled upwards and flew wide open on its hinges – and the toad sprang from the dashboard, landing with a breathtaking thud in Harry’s groin. Blinded by the great flapping sheet of metal, winded by the impact of the toad, Harry trod on the brake. The car slithered to a halt in the roadside gravel. Clutching the natterjack to his belly, instinctively reaching for the neckerchief and jamming it into his pocket, Harry tore off his seat belt, flung open his door and rolled clear.

  The car was going up. A column of smoke rose from the engine and from the dashboard. There was a crackle of sparks as all the fuses blew. The first of the flames started licking at an oil slick which had spewed onto the road. Then the flames burst through the sooty contraptions of the engine, melting plastic and rubber and flex into a stinking, treacly ooze.

  The girl sat calmly in all the smoke. Harry thrust the toad into his pocket, stumbled back to the car and leaned hysterically towards her. ‘Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!’ he shouted, trying to grab her dressing gown, her hands, her hair, trying to pull her out of the seat. But she was a dead weight. He couldn’t unstrap her. She lolled like a broken, boneless doll.

  The bus had caught up and pulled into the roadside, fifty yards short of the burning car. Through his streaming, smoke-filled eyes, Harry saw the driver and the passengers running towards him. But he waved so violently, he screamed so hoarsely – ‘Get back! Get back! It’s going up! Get back!’ – that they stopped and gaped from a safe distance, shielding their faces from the increasing heat. They saw the red-headed man grappling at the core of the fire, wrestling to free a small blonde figure who was trapped in what would normally have been the driver’s seat.

  The stench of oil and rubber was overwhelming. Retching, gulping, gagging, at last he sprung the girl’s seat belt. He lifted her by the dressing gown, dragged her upright on the smouldering seat and lumped her over his shoulder. He trod away from the car.

  Blinded by panic, Harry lumbered up the hillside, higher and higher from the road. His eyes burned, his chest heaved with the effort of climbing, his throat was scorched by the fumes he’d inhaled. At last, unable to carry the girl any more, he dropped her in a bed of bracken. Far below him, the car was engulfed in smoke. The plume rose black and thick and unwavering, a hundred feet high.

  And the flames! No longer confined to the oil slick and the engine, they leaped from one end of the car to the other. As Harry flopped the girl into the bracken and tried to steady his breathing, the petrol tank ignited. With a roar that echoed and echoed on the peaks of Snowdon, the car exploded. It blew into white-hot shrapnel, shards of splintered glass and spatters of molten rubber. It erupted in a ball of poisonous orange flame.

  After the explosion itself, the wreckage burned evenly, a glorious autumn bonfire. Harry stood and watched, aghast; the sun winked into his broken lens, a spangle of sparks in his right eye. He took his glasses off and rubbed at his forehead. He’d forgotten the toad, but now, feeling it writhing in his pocket, he pulled it out and squirmed it on the bridge of his nose. With his eyes squeezed shut, he could see the arc of sparks: the angel of pain and wretchedness, summoned by the surge of adrenalin. And this time, the pain came at once, without waiting for the sparks to go away. His poor head, punched and scratched so often in the last few days, pounded so hard he thought it would split.

  With a roar of anger, he flung his glasses as far as he could down the hillside. He pressed the toad to the bruises and cuts on his face. He held it to his brow, while the creature pumped its legs and writhed in protest. It started to swell. The blotchy skin tightened and tightened. It oozed a nettling poison. Still, maddened by the jangling and thudding inside his head, Harry rubbed with the toad. Leaving the girl in the bracken, he paced this way and that, groaning and wailing, stumbling on scattered boulders, all but blinded by the dazzling sparks.

  Until his head seemed to burst in flames, as the car had burst into flames . . .

  There was an explosion inside it, a blooming of red and white fire. He fell to the ground beside the girl, retching into the damp, cold grass. Then he lay still.

  The fit was quickly over. The angel had come and gone in no more than a minute, the worst but the shortest visit he’d ever had. A wave of relief swept through him.

  As his head and his vision cleared, he looked down to the road. The fire was still blazing; the bus driver and some of his passengers were running this way and that, flapping at it with their hands. One of them was struggling gamely, hopelessly, with an extinguisher. There was a great commotion. When the people looked up and saw the redheaded man high on the hillside, they started to wave. They clapped and cheered. Harry stood up and heaved the girl to her feet. Heroic, he cuddled the girl upright, clasped her to him, lifted her hand in his, and together they waved back, acknowledging the applause.

  Gently, reverently, he laid the girl down again. Kneeling beside her, he found the body of the natterjack toad. He must have squeezed it dead. It was still and cold, like a rotten potato. The eyes were shut, hidden, locked away.

  No jewel. No toadstone. Just a knob of rubbery flesh.

  But the magic had been there. Harry had felt the power inside him. It had delivered the golden girl. It had defeated the rock-climber. Now, at the end, it had banished the angel of pain and wretched­ness. He hid the toad in the long grass.

  He lay down with the girl and cuddled her to him, nuzzling his face into her hair. He slid a hand inside her dressing gown, cupping a soft, warm breast. And there he found the letter. Lizzie’s letter! He slipped it out and tore the envelope open.

  And Harry Clewe was lying in the bracken, delightedly reading with his head on the dead girl’s shoulder, as the first of the people climbed up the hillside towards him.

  Part Two: Brittlestar

  Chapter One

  It was a morning in November, early in the 1970s. Harry Clewe emerged onto the deck of his boat, the Ozymandias.

  He scanned the scene from the mountains in the west, across the sandflats to the distant dunes, to the Menai Strait and Anglesey and the open sea. The tide was right out of the estuary. The chan­nels of the river burrowed through exposed mud, and on this mud there were congregations of feeding birds. He inhaled fiercely, the cold salt air reviving him from a befuddled sleep. All around him and above him was a silver-grey sky, flecked with cloud: a huge sky that made him feel he was no longer earthbound, but soaring into space. Blue mountains floated on a surf of mist.

  He dashed below, tiptoed
through the cabin as quietly as he could so as not to waken the young woman who was sleeping there, and he returned on deck with his binoculars. There was a flock of widgeon, shoulder to shoulder on the flanks of the river; cormorants, black and angular like spars from a shipwreck; innumer­able gulls and waders; a pair of shelduck, handsome and plump, adjusting themselves like women at a swimming pool; a flo­tilla of swans; a heron, stalking for eels in the shallow pools; mergansers, those sleek, dandified divers . . . All this in one sweep of the estuary, as, for the past six years, he’d surveyed it from the deck of the Ozymandias.

  Harry focused on the gulls, whose whiteness was smudged by the crows which fell among them. It was a furious commotion. The birds rose in a black and white cloud, squalling and screaming, and dropped again to the mud at the ebb of the tide. He cursed the condition of the binoculars, for the lenses were smeared and sandy and fogged by his breath, and for a moment he rubbed at them with a spotted red neckerchief he tugged out of his pocket. But it made no difference. He was intrigued to see what was causing such excitement at the water’s edge. He wondered what the birds had found, that they should squabble so violently. He wondered what the sea had fetched up.

  He stepped off the boat and onto the sea wall. From there he negotiated the rusty, slippery rungs of the iron ladder which was bolted to the wall, lowering himself onto the foreshore. He stood on the mud and shingle in which the hull was embedded, unzipped his trousers and urinated; and then, satisfied with a rapid inspection of the boat’s timbers, he picked his way across the shore, over the seaweed-slippery boulders, and through the rolled-up flotsam of grasses, branches and sun-dried vegetation. Once on the flat sands, he moved more quickly in the direction of the birds.

  The gulls and the crows gave way to him, whirling into the sky. The crows rowed raggedly ashore, to the fields where flocks of curlew and oystercatcher were feeding, and the gulls crossed to the dunes. Harry looked about, to see what had attracted such a mob.

  The birds had gathered on the skeleton of a horse. It had been there for as long as Harry had lived on the estuary, a landmark on the open sands which he’d often seen on his walks. The first time he’d found it, he’d thought it was the wreckage of a small boat embedded in the mud. The ribcage was intact, like a huge, vicious trap left by primitive men for the capture of bears or other men. Pieces of the vertebrae lay round about, sunk into the sand. Bones . . . brown, riddled, softened to the consistency of sponge. The skull . . . no more than a shell, stuffed with mud, which gaped and was good only for the burrowing of worms and crabs. This was the wreckage of the horse. Harry stopped there and touched the pieces with his foot.

  The pools and puddles were squirming with life. He knelt down to see exactly what had drawn the gulls and the crows to the skeleton. It was a phenomenon that Harry had seldom encoun­tered before: the brown water of low tide was alive with hundreds of brittlestars.

  The brittlestar: a creature akin to the starfish, but so much finer and more fragile that it was more like a bizarre marine spider. He picked one up on the palm of his hand, where it writhed and convulsed, where it arched itself in spasm.

  An extraordinary, prehistoric animal. No eyes, no anus; a disc of a body, brown and hard, like a crumb of biscuit the size of a sixpence, from which five arms extended. These arms were about four inches long, extremely thin and delicate, covered with tiny brown spines. Harry put his face down to it, watching the arms as they curled and shivered. The brittlestar lived in the waters of the estuary, feeling blindly in the shifting darkness, passing food from the tips of its tube-feet to the underside of its disc-body and expel­ling waste from its mouth. A simple creature, odd and primeval, moving blindly with the movement of the tides . . .

  Here, attracting the birds to feed on them, were hundreds of brittlestars. Harry scooped up dozens and saw that there were many different sizes and colours, a tangled, knotted handful of blue and green and orange and yellow, of mottled and marbled brown and black. The gulls had returned, screaming overhead, and he felt the rain of their droppings on his back and in his thick, red hair. But he ignored them. He held the brittlestars in his hands, mar­vel­ling at them. He was thrilled to find them so near to the mooring of the Ozymandias.

  Standing up, he let the brittlestars drop back into the water, where they sculled among the bones of the horse. The crows and the gulls were hysterical around him, impatient for him to go. He walked over the sands towards the boat, keeping in his hand just one of the brittlestars, and he clambered up the iron ladder to the top of the sea wall.

  He tiptoed across the deck and down into the cabin. Without making a sound, he put the brittlestar in a shallow tray of water with a bed of sand. It squirmed and meshed, exploring, and soon it settled in this pool which was no different from the tidal pool from which Harry Clewe had lifted it. Here it was safe from the birds.

  Quickly, silently, Harry took off his clothes and dropped them on the floor. Slipping under the rumpled sheet, he nestled to the soft, warm, naked body of the young woman who was lying asleep in the bed. She groaned and stirred, because at first his skin was cold. As she awoke, they made love, tenderly, urgently, with a hectic passion. They shuddered together, two bodies fused into one.

  Afterwards, they kissed and fell apart. He pressed his face into her long red hair. ‘I’ve been on the beach, while you were still asleep,’ he whispered. ‘Look, little Lizzie, I’ve got something to show you . . .’

  Chapter Two

  It had happened like this.

  As for the tragic events of that autumn in the late 1960s, once Harry’s migraine had gone and his head had cleared, he’d explained the accident in which the rock-climber and Sarah had died. He’d told the truth, simple and unembellished. Patrick had come to the cottage, angry and aggressive, to find the girl. Fumbling for a light, the man had turned on the power which had killed him and the girl in the electrified bathroom.

  Harry, in deep shock, had taken the dead girl joy-riding through Beddgelert and into the hills. He could hardly remember it; it was a blur to him, a nightmarish blur of migraine and madness. In any case, he was blameless; he’d reported the faulty wiring to his land­lord, but the repairs hadn’t been done. And that was that. The coroner had recorded a verdict of accidental death.

  Soon afterwards, Harry had moved down from the mountains to the shore, a few miles south of Caernarfon. The Ozymandias was an old customs launch he’d spotted on the remotest edge of the estuary and bought for a negligible sum, the write-off value of the Mercedes-Benz. It would be a refuge for him, where he might live on his own and try to forget what had happened. He’d made the boat habitable with a little work on the decks to ensure they were watertight, by installing a wood-burning stove which heated the cabin and enabled him to cook, and by bringing in the books and pictures he’d had in his Snowdonian cottage. The only reminder of his pursuit of Sarah was the red spotted neckerchief, which he would carry in his pocket or sometimes slip under his pillow.

  He’d never been cold on the Ozymandias, even in the worst of the frosts which clenched the timbers of the hull and made them groan and crack, in the worst of the gales which swept from the sea and made the boat shudder and moan like an old sow. It had been home for Harry Clewe, for six years on his own . . .

  Until, one morning, a telegram had been delivered to him.

  It was from Lizzie, his little sister; not so little, for she was eighteen now and had just started her first year as a student at the Royal College of Music in London. The telegram told him that their parents, from whom Harry had been estranged since the trouble in Snowdonia, had been killed in a car accident.

  So Harry took a train to Shrewsbury for the funeral. Lizzie came up from London. Afterwards, seeing that she was stunned by the bereavement, Harry had suggested on impulse that she should come back to North Wales with him and stay on the boat for a few days before returning to her studies. That was how it started.

  It had been dark when they’d arrived at the boat, pitch-dark at
midnight in late October. After the train to Bangor and a taxi to Caernarfon, it was an hour’s walk along the beach, hand in hand on the shingle and weed of the foreshore, before they’d reached the mooring of the Ozymandias. Harry led his sister through a bewildering darkness, without talking except to encourage her on and on. No moonlight, no starlight. No sound but their crunching footsteps, their own irregular breathing, the cry of a heron on the estuary . . . At last they were there.

  ‘Now stand still, Lizzie,’ Harry said, his voice sounding loud in the still, cold night. ‘We’re on the sea wall, where there’s a bit of a bend in the shoreline. The boat’s tied up right here. I’m going to leave you for a minute while I go on board and unlock and go down below to turn some lamps on. For heaven’s sake, don’t move. If you wander about, you’ll step right off the edge and into the water. Luckily, with the tide high at the moment, the boat’s floating to the top of the wall, so it’ll be easy for us to climb aboard. Stay there now.’

  He let go of her hand, for the first time since they’d got out of the taxi in Caernarfon square. She heard his footsteps on the wall, and then groans and the slapping of water as he boarded the boat. She heard him jangling the keys, the click of a lock and the sound of his footsteps fading as he went down into the cabin. Suddenly, miraculously, there was a light. A spark became a flare and settled to the gentle glow of a paraffin lamp, visible to her through a little round window. As she grew accustomed to this light, the first glimmer she’d seen for more than an hour, Lizzie took a few cautious steps forwards, feeling the smoothness of the sea wall beneath her feet. Harry emerged from the doorway onto the deck, his every movement altering the level of the boat, so that this new light, which might then have been the only light in the world, danced before her.