The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  The child fell silent. She eyed them.

  ‘What is she?’ the woman was whispering. She struggled to control her breath, to control her sobbing. ‘What the fuck is she? What’s she trying to do? No wonder Lizzie killed herself! She must have known something was wrong, right from the moment the thing was born! What is she, Harry?’

  ‘I was going to tell you, Helen,’ he was saying, although the woman, smearing the tears from her cheeks, had already bent away from him and was starting to retrieve her scattered clothing. ‘I was going to tell you. For Christ’s sake listen to me, will you? Listen to me!’

  He heaved the woman upright, gripping her arms so hard that she squealed with pain. She wriggled, she tossed her hair, she rolled her eyes, as hysterical as the child had been, until Harry fetched her a slap like a whiplash on the side of her face. She stared at him, aghast at the blow. Holding her so close to him that their foreheads and noses nearly touched, he bellowed at her through clenched teeth.

  ‘Listen, Helen! Listen! I was trying to tell you the reason for everything! We were brother and sister, Lizzie and me! Harry and Lizzie Clewe! Brother and sister! That’s why Lizzie killed herself, for the guilt she couldn’t stand! And that’s why the child’s blind, because of the blood in her, the inbreeding! That’s why Zoë’s the way she is! She killed Lizzie, as good as murdered her, and now she’s trying to kill me! We were brother and sister, Lizzie and me! Do you hear what I’m saying to you?’

  The woman went limp. There was a long silence, broken only by the crackle of the stove. Then Zoë started chuckling, a chuckle like the noise the jackdaw used to make. At this, Helen blinked very hard. She stared around her and into Harry’s face as though she were trying to work out whether the place and the man were real or just part of a particularly unpleasant dream she was having.

  ‘Brother and sister?’ she said at last. ‘You and Lizzie?’

  She’d heard the words, but her mind was struggling to make sense of them. She glanced from Harry to the giggling girl, and to the beam above her head which was scored so deeply. She was beginning to understand. She spoke very slowly, panting.

  ‘I thought you were man and wife,’ she said. ‘Everybody must have thought so. Your secret, your guilty secret, until, with a baby coming, Lizzie couldn’t stand it any more. So that’s why she did it. She couldn’t live with it, so she . . . Oh, Christ! And Zoë, born blind . . . is that something that happens? Oh, Christ, I’m starting to see it now!’

  Her words tailed off. Zoë had stopped giggling. She hung on the telescope, her face white, her lips blue, and the grin on her mouth was cold and hard. Still naked, Helen drifted across the cabin. Tentatively, as though daring to stroke a dangerous animal, she reached out to touch the child’s head. Zoë watched the hand come closer and closer, and then she snarled like a stoat. The woman recoiled with a shiver.

  ‘Starting to see, Aunty Helen?’ the child hissed. ‘That’s a good one! Starting to see!’ She giggled again, a horrid rattling in her throat, but the effort was too great for her. Her strength, her life, was almost extinguished.

  Helen grabbed her clothes. Without pausing to put them on, she bundled them under her arm and made for the cabin door. Frightened beyond words, she bolted on deck and sprang onto the sea wall. Harry followed her, too slow to try and stop her from leaving. He saw her naked figure in the summer twilight, as she fumbled with her car door, as she slung her clothes inside, as she jumped in and started the engine. She manoeuvred to turn the car round, throwing up gravel as the tyres spun.

  Harry was helpless to prevent her. He stood naked on the deck of the Ozymandias and he shouted, sobbing and wringing the words out until his chest was aching and his throat burning with tears. ‘We loved one another! I loved Lizzie! She loved me! What was wrong with that? Why should we be punished for it? Why? We loved one another!’

  He sank to his knees, weeping, as Helen drove wildly away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Harry must have stayed like that for ten minutes or fifteen minutes or half an hour. At last, when he came to himself, he stared around at the darkening estuary.

  It was the same summer’s night as the one, nine years ago, when he’d cycled into town to telephone the hospital about Lizzie’s imminent delivery. Exactly the same. It was warm and still. The tide was up, stirring softly in the weed on the foreshore, high enough to move the grass on the edge of the track. Very gently, the Ozymandias rose and fell. The stars were veiled in a haze of cloud. The only sounds were the cries of the curlew, somewhere in the dis­tant dunes, and the fluting of a blackbird in the hedgerow. A lovely night. The lights of the town glowed in the northern sky. High above the ocean, a shooting star flared and faded and fell to the horizon.

  The same night. As Harry knelt on the deck of the boat, he wondered whether it had all been a terrible dream. Now, if he went below, he would find that Lizzie was there, that the baby was due, and he would cycle to town to phone for help . . . then back to the Ozymandias in time for the ambulance to arrive. They could go to the hospital together, and everything would be all right. Yes, he’d imagined it all. What a dream he’d had! What a nightmare!

  But two things told him he wasn’t dreaming, that the nightmare had been real and he was still inside it. First of all, he was stark naked. And then, from the cabin below, he heard the sound of breaking glass. . .

  Harry stood up. He inhaled very deeply. Steeling himself for what he might find, he tiptoed downstairs.

  The cabin was in darkness. The candles were out. Peering into the shadows, he saw the dull red embers of the dying fire. A flame fluttered in the stove, enough for him to see that Zoë was no longer bound to the telescope; he made out its looming shape, the glint of it, the tights still knotted on the mounting. But no Zoë. He strained his eyes for a movement, strained his ears for a sound. There was neither.

  ‘Zoë?’ he whispered. ‘Zoë? Are you there?’

  Silence. The flicker of the fire. The pungency of dead candles. The lingering perfume. No sound.

  ‘Zoë? Where are you, Zoë?’

  He stepped forward one pace. Something crackled under the soles of his bare feet, and he gasped with pain. Gingerly, he took another step. The floor was littered with broken glass.

  He limped to the bed to avoid cutting himself more, and, at the same time, as the firelight flared and lit the room, Zoë appeared from her corner. She saw her father, naked and nursing his feet, and she smiled as she moved towards the stove. She was barefooted too, but she didn’t wince as she trod on the splinters of glass. They crunched with every step, until she stopped and reached up to the barrel of the telescope.

  ‘I broke this as well, Daddy,’ she hissed, the smile set hard on her face. ‘Like I broke the seashells. They were silly, weren’t they? And this was silly too. You couldn’t really see anything in it, could you, Daddy? Well? Could you?’

  She tilted the tube. An avalanche of glass fragments slid out. They flashed in the light from the stove, a fusion of fire and ice.

  ‘I used this again, Daddy!’ she whispered. ‘Like I used it on the seashells!’ She brandished the hatchet at him.

  He looked away from her glittering face. Her eyes were too bright for him. He threw a glance at her most recent wreckage, the telescope which drooped its head and shed its tears of ice; at the walls too, where, with the same hatchet, she’d smashed the seashell stars. In the darkness of the cabin, the embers of the fire lit up the little girl’s hair. She gazed at him, this child whose eyes were so cold and whose skin was so cold. She was ice, with only a wasting core of fire.

  He heard himself whisper, his voice distant and disembodied. ‘Who are you, Zoë? What are you? Are you awake or asleep? Are you alive or dead?’

  She blinked at him.

  ‘Why did you come here?’ he whispered. ‘To punish us? For the wrong we did? Was it wrong?’

  She blinked at him.

  More loudly, he said, ‘Have you done enough, Zoë? Wasn’t it enough for you, wh
at you did to your mother? Are you finished now?’

  The child frowned. She shivered so hard that she almost dropped the hatchet. A spasm took hold of her and rattled her bones. In a kind of fit, her lips went blue, a froth of foam appeared on her mouth, and she squeezed her eyes shut for a second or two. Zoë didn’t answer any of his questions. Instead, when she opened her eyes, she was smiling again, a thin, cold smile. She beamed those eyes which were no longer blind. Licking the spittle from her lips, she hissed a plume of frosty breath. She hefted the hatchet in both hands and sprang at him.

  In this final hour, awake or asleep, alive or dead, Zoë possessed a terrible strength. It was too much for Harry Clewe. She was no longer a child. Perhaps she’d never been a child. She was a mad thing, which screamed and frothed and spat. The nightmare was here, in the cabin of the Ozymandias.

  Harry rolled from the bed and recoiled from the thing which was attacking him. He leaped from her, and his flesh was scorched on the stove. His feet were flayed. He scrambled behind the telescope, heard the clang of the hatchet on the mounting as he avoided an arcing blow, as he ducked from the hiss of the blade. Crying out, her face contorted to a mask in which the eyes blazed white, Zoë pursued him to every shadow of the room, from the darkness to the light and into darkness again. The nightmare was endless. Her mask was before him, the ice of her breath was on his naked skin, the flecks of her spittle on his mouth. The cabin lunged. The fire flared into tumbling sparks. There was no sensa­tion of time: this was a dream from which he couldn’t wake. When he stumbled, when he fell to the floor with his arms held out to lessen the impact, Zoë was above him and the axe was raised high. . . .

  The blade came down. With a whoop of manic laughter, Zoë struck with all the dregs of her strength. The hatchet hit Harry’s wrist. The blade embedded in the floor of the cabin. And his hand, his left hand, was severed from him.

  No pain. But a starving cold which pounced on him and gnawed at his bones. Blood spurted from his shattered wrist, gobbets of blood which pumped with the rhythm of his pulse.

  No pain. But a draining of heat and a flooding with cold. A lot of blood. His body was no longer white, but glistening red.

  No pain. But a feeling of overwhelming puzzlement. He gazed about in a stupor, while the cabin swam and swayed.

  He noticed how Zoë staggered from him, clutching the hatchet which she’d tugged out of the floorboards, how she looked down at her blood-spattered pyjamas, how she looked around the room and frowned into the darkness. Zoë was shivering too. The cold was too much. She stooped to the floor and picked up her father’s hand. She sniffed it, grimaced horribly, and tossed it into the stove, where the wetness of blood and the stickiness from inside the woman began to hiss. Harry watched, disinterested, as the hand blistered and crisped. The fingers curled into a fist. Suddenly, it crackled into flames. It blackened and charred in the embers of the fire.

  Zoë moved up the steps of the cabin with enormous weariness, trailing the weight of the hatchet and bumping its bloody blade behind her. He heard her leaden footsteps on the deck. Then there was silence.

  Harry Clewe slouched on the floor with his head on the bed, stark naked, drunk, ice cold in a pool of cooling blood. Perhaps he was dying. His eyes were closing. Just as they were about to shut, he made out the scar on the beam above him. It was barely visible in the fading firelight, only a hairline crack . . . but enough to rescue him from sleep and certain death. It was where Zoë had murdered Lizzie. Nine years before, nine years to the minute, the nightmare had started there.

  And now that Zoë was cooling, now that the bright hot star was dying, Harry was startled into the realisation that she would take him with her, unless . . . unless he could . . . unless he could stir himself and save himself. No one else would save him. He was on his own. He must move or be Zoë’s final victim.

  With a colossal effort, he heaved himself up and managed to slump on the side of the bed. Then, with his knees in the blood, where the fragments of the lenses gleamed like rubies, he dragged himself to the telescope and tugged at the tights which were knotted there. He undid them with the fingers of his right hand. Racked with a killing cold, shaking uncontrollably, pulsing rosettes of blood from his left wrist, he fumbled in the drawers of the bookcase . . . and, yes, they were still there, the remaining three strings he’d unwound from the cello before he’d smashed the thing to splinters and fed it to the fire. He collapsed on the bed again, with the tights and the sinuous strings.

  He did it, somehow, without being conscious of how he was doing it. His instinct to survive was so strong, his instinct not to be beaten by Zoë. His instinct to escape the nightmare.

  He improvised a tourniquet, padding the thickest of the cello strings by winding it inside the tights, looping it round and round his forearm and knotting it as tightly as he could by tugging with his teeth. That was the best he could do.

  He tore a blanket off the bed and flung it round his shoulders. The warmth of it and the woman’s lingering perfume flooded his senses. A wonderful oblivion beckoned . . . the oblivion of sleep. It almost overwhelmed him, the need to lie down, to fall backwards and roll himself into as small and safe a ball as he could, the need to sleep . . . the sleep of death. . . .

  He fought it off. With a wild cry, he forced himself to stare at the beam again, at the scar on the beam. Deliberately, to fire himself with rage, he conjured a vision of the Lizzie he’d seen, dangling, gurgling, garrotted, dead. . .

  He must not sleep! He would die if he slept! Again, as it had spurred him into action with the improvised tourniquet, an instinct to survive surged through him. He wasn’t dead! He need not die! Inhaling sharply, exhilarated by the icy air in his nostrils, he ground his teeth so hard that the sound was loud inside his head. He forced himself to move, in spite of the pain in all his limbs, and felt the beating of blood which might warm him and save him. His body came alive. He’d looked at death. The sleep of death had been on him. Now he shook it vigorously off and swung his legs to the floor.

  Crunching on the shattered glass, clutching the blanket round his shoulders, he clambered to the deck. The movement began a terrible throbbing in his arm, an agony he could hardly bear. He jammed the stump, staunched by the binding of nylon and wire, into his right armpit. The throbbing eased and he gritted his teeth against it.

  To his great surprise, the night air was much warmer than the air in the cabin. The cloud had lifted. A sliver of moon lit the sky. He squinted the length of the boat.

  Zoë was there. She was standing on the edge of the deck. She was finished. She drooped, she wilted. There was no life in her. In the pale moonlight, he could make out her fragile form, silhouetted on the silver sea, and he saw how thin she was, so wasted, so worn. She was a shell of the boiling bright child she’d been.

  ‘Zoë?’ he whispered. ‘Little Zoë?’

  She turned to him, but he couldn’t see her face. She had her back to the only light in the sky, and her eyes were so dead that there was no light in them. She might have been smiling, but he couldn’t see her mouth.

  ‘Zoë? What have you done to me?’

  He moved his knotted stump from under his arm. There was a pain in it like fire, as though the stump were a flaming torch he could brandish, as though his whole body were in flames.

  ‘What did you do to me, Zoë? Look, Zoë! Look what you’ve done to me!’ He gestured at her with the throbbing, oozing piece of arm.

  And suddenly, the last thing he would have expected, he felt laughter inside him. It began in his belly, warm and good, and bubbled into his chest. Its energy coursed through him. Renewed with a triumphant, hysterical strength, he tasted the laughter in his throat. It burst from him like a shout. He cackled uncontrollably and he reeled towards Zoë. The blanket fell from his shoulders. Naked, bloody, he shook the stump above his head.

  ‘I’m not dead!’ he bellowed. ‘I’m not! You killed your mother but you couldn’t kill me! Look at me! Look at this! I’m still alive! You can
see it! You can touch it! You can feel it! You can feel how fucking hot it is!’

  He jabbed the stump at the darkness where her face should have been, at the dead, cold smile that smelled of deadness. At the dead eyes, dead and empty. . . .

  She recoiled from it, retreating a step or two. He struck at her with the wrist, dangling its bracelet of wire and nylon. He aimed at the place where her eyes should be. Roaring, guffawing, shaking with laughter, he drove her backwards with a series of blows, and his hot new blood was on her, with each squelching impact. She offered no resistance. She didn’t cry out. She retreated, while Harry rammed at her with the weapon she’d given him. Then she stum­bled. She staggered, and the only sound she made was a tiny gasp. She tottered to the very edge of the deck, and her arms wind­milled for a purchase on the air.

  ‘Zoë! Zoë!’ he cried out, seeing that the child was on the brink. ‘Zoë! My Zoë!’

  He could have reached her. He could have snatched at her, caught hold of her pyjamas or her hair. But he didn’t. In that long, long second, as the child leaned from the deck and into the space that yawned beneath her, the laughter died inside him. The moonlight was on her face. There was a smile on her mouth. Her eyes, as faint and as cold as dead stars, met his.

  She fell into the water. There was hardly a splash. The sea folded around her, very black and very deep. For a moment, Harry saw the whiteness of her face below the surface. . . . Then she was gone.

  Harry tumbled from the deck of the Ozymandias, down the stairs into the cabin. He collapsed on the bed, shivering and numb, and swam into a drowning oblivion. He would surely have died.

  But Helen saved him. She came back, less than an hour after she’d left, to see how he was coping. Appalled, nauseated, she untied the cello-string tourniquet and retied it with a faded, spotted red neckerchief she snatched from under the pillow; she wrapped Harry in blankets, bundled him into her car and raced him to hospital.