Aaaiiieee

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  “He didn’t run off.” McGee started at a child’s scream of laughter down the street. He shuddered and tucked his head into his shoulders. “I been drinking and I’m old and tired. I gotta go home now and forget the past until next year if I’m still here. And I suppose I’ll come to look then, too. Almost every year, even when I lived in Shrewsbury…”

  “You never told anyone that you changed your mind about his innocence?”

  McGee squinted at me. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

  “No. I was a little boy when you left town.”

  “You want to know why I changed my mind? Do you? Well, you wouldn’t believe me. Drunken babblings, you’d say. And that’s just what they’d have said back then, if I told them what I saw. You were drunk, chief, they’d have said. You were drunk on the job. I had a problem with it, boy…I couldn’t tell them or they’d have said I was crazy. A crazy drunk. And maybe I was crazy. Maybe I didn’t even see him…”

  “See who?”

  “Phillips. Ed Phillips. I saw him that night.”

  “What night?”

  “I never told them.”

  “What night?”

  “You heard that story. About the baby? That baby somebody left on Doc Sullivan’s doorstep that night in October of ‘57?”

  “Heard it? That’s…”

  “The baby,” he interrupted, “was wrapped in men’s pajamas, left on the step with no note, bawling its head off. Little boy. Doc Sullivan thought he heard someone pounding on the door. When he came down, nobody was there but the baby—the person who left it musta ran off, he figured. But he coulda sworn he heard someone yelling, ‘Help me, help me’ in a strangled kind of voice when he heard that pounding. Just a trick to get him to come down and find the baby, he figured. So they put it in the papers but nobody ever identified the baby, and this couple came and adopted it, couple here in town. So that was the end of that…so they all think.”

  “But…”

  “Let me finish. I can tell you now—hell, what can they do, take away my badge? What do I care, I’m seventy-seven…”

  “You saw Ed Phillips that night?”

  “I was sittin’ in my cruiser down the reservoir with a bottle. Heat on. Relaxing. I had too much, I admit it…I had a problem then…”

  “But you saw him? After he’d supposedly disappeared already?”

  “He came out of the woods, right in front of me. Damn near had a coronary. He looked at me. We just stared at each other a minute. I should’ve gotten out, I should’ve…I didn’t. I sat there. I couldn’t get out. Then he just stumbled off in the dark and I lost sight of him. I didn’t go after him. I didn’t call it in.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid, boy. I was plain paralyzed afraid. It was his face. His hair all sticking out, his eyes…sticking out. Like a crazy man. And he was twitching all over, and jerking, like he was having a fit the whole time. Scariest damn thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t really explain it now thirty-three years later. And I never told a soul.”

  “And that same night the baby was left on the doctor’s doorstep?”

  “The same night. The next day I found out about that. I saw the baby, and the pajamas it was wrapped in. And I almost had me another coronary but I still kept my trap shut.”

  “What was the matter?”

  “When I saw Ed come out of the woods he was wearing those same pajamas. Red and white stripes. Same damn pajamas so help me Jesus.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God…”

  * * *

  I can’t tell you now the feeling that spread through me.

  I stammered a good-night to the old man. He walked down the street one way, I went back the way I’d come, both of us away from the Yellow House.

  My mind was swimming. It was almost a panic. I wanted to run home to my parents but I knew I had to keep calm. That’s when I decided to begin an orderly investigation, a sane and rational examination of facts. I decided to write all this down. Calm. Rational…

  I haven’t told Pammy any of this yet. I haven’t confronted my foster parents either, though I doubt they know much anyway.

  It was they who had adopted me after Dr. Sullivan found me on his doorstep that October night in 1957. The Mystery Baby, the papers called me then…another town celebrity, another funny story.

  Edwin Phillips kidnapped me, I’ve told myself. Or fathered me. Then he left me on Dr. Sullivan’s step, first wrapping me in the pajamas he wore. And then he’d fled. Fled…naked? Fled where?

  He kidnapped me, or fathered me, I’ve got to stay calm. He must be my father. That’s where I got my red hair. It isn’t wild and uncombed; it’s short and neat. It isn’t the same…

  But I do have this bad habit. I’m lazy, that’s all.

  I don’t like to shave.

  Fallen

  “Angel of flight, you soarer, you flapper, you floater, you gull that grows out of my back in the dreams I prefer.”

  —Anne Sexton

  He made his escape under the cover of rain, I realized later. And before he invaded my apartment, he first practiced his escape by invading my dreams.

  The dreams were of soaring; above great forests, pastures, ancient villages and modem cities…above landscapes totally alien, as lovely as strange-colored seas or as hideous as bloody canyons torn in the flesh of a living planet. I saw through his eyes, experienced the freedom and the ecstasy of flight.

  But in one recurring dream, while he rested between flights in some secret place, the men in black robes appeared, and cursed him, made signs to bind him, converged upon him with daggers and chains and incantations. I would start awake, as if I were the one stabbed and bound, their evil faces still floating before my eyes in a dispersing vaporous residue.

  I attributed these dreams of flight and freedom to some deep subconscious yearning. As a young girl I had been struck by a car while riding my bike, my legs so crushed I was lucky to regain the ability to walk. On cold damp days I had to use a cane, even at my still youthful age, and the scars on my legs were so pronounced that I never wore shorts or a bathing suit. In fact, I was even ashamed to let a lover see them, and preferred the safety of darkness for lovemaking. Not that this was a frequent concern. My scars prevented me from even letting lovers approach me. They never had a chance to be repulsed; I was repulsed for them.

  On that night of rain, I heard a crash from the parlor of the third floor flat I masochistically rented, and I sat up in bed to listen. I heard my cat Virgil hiss and spit, then scamper into another room. Afraid now, I slid stealthily from bed, pulled on sweat pants and a T-shirt and advanced shakily toward the murky parlor, picking up a flashlight from atop my bureau as I went—as much for a weapon as for light—though I didn’t yet thumb it on.

  Only the darkest light filtered into the parlor, but still I hesitated to turn on the flashlight, let alone a lamp. Was anyone in here? If so, was I as invisible to them as they were to me? I strained my hearing, but only ended up listening to the rain, or was that the surf of my own blood in my ears? At last, unable to stand the thought of being studied from the shadows, I pointed the light at the door to my apartment and switched it on.

  He crouched there, close to the floor, his curly dark hair plastered to his head, his eyes wide and frantic. Naked—and his flesh glaringly pale in the harsh light, which was unkind to the wounds in him, the hooks in his bruised flesh.

  I screamed, and before I could turn to run or even move the light I saw him fling himself at me. In so doing, wings spread wide from his shoulders, and they were broad and black and it was as though a great wave were falling upon me.

  When I awoke, I was back in bed, and the being knelt beside me, gripping my hand in both of his. I couldn’t see him well, and I cried out again, jerked my hand free, fumbled for the bedside lamp. When it came on he shielded his eyes. His wings lifted a bit but did not unfold again.

  “Oh my God,” I remember saying,
sitting up, hugging myself, “who are you? Who are you?”

  He looked up at me, his eyes pained and beseeching. I had time now to better take in the severity and profusion of his wounds. Though his body was as beautiful as that of a Greek sculpture, it was cruelly pierced with barbs and hooks, some still attached to chains which he had wound around his arms or waist. His white skin showed scars that were whiter still, and raised symbolic designs that had been branded onto him. His wings were particularly mutilated, their joints and where they joined his shoulders bearing awful scars, and pinned with black metal clasps to hinder or prevent movement, these also hung with weights. The sleek black feathers of his wings held an oil-slick’s iridescence, and still dripped rain drops to the hardwood floor.

  Cautiously I crept out of bed, and only his eyes followed me. Moving around him, I was able to see his wings more clearly, to prove to myself that indeed they grew out of his shoulders, that the scars were not an indication of some bizarre surgery.

  “My God,” I said again, but softly this time; and again I said, but in awe, “who are you? Who are you?”

  I knew only one thing about him. That he had visited me in my dreams so as to prepare me for this night.

  I went to the parlor, put on one light. He had broken the chain on the door. I locked it with the bolt instead. Turning, I saw that he had timidly followed me into the room, and was reaching out to pet Virgil, who gave a warning growl and flicked his tail but reluctantly allowed his head to be stroked. The being looked to me, and smiled.

  The bells of the old monastery at the end of my block tolled midnight as they did every night. I was not religious, had no idea if this were a common practice for such a place or what significance it held. But the sound terrified the creature. Before I could protest he came to me, and held my right hand in both of his hands. His grip was strong, painful, but it wasn’t meant to restrain me, I knew. It was an expression of fear.

  I did not go to my classes the next day. How could I leave him here alone? In the morning my landlady Mrs. Hanson, who lived on the first floor of the old tenement house, phoned to ask if I had had another of my awful nightmares last night. I told her I had, but that everything was all right now.

  I made coffee, and the seraph sat at the kitchen table watching me, smiling whenever I met his eyes like a stray dog appealing for some kindness. His hair and wings had dried at last. I considered offering him some sweat-pants to wear to cover his nudity, but the thought of so exotic a being in so prosaic a garment seemed beneath his dignity.

  His wounds troubled me more than his nakedness, and at last I could stand it no longer. I set down my coffee, dug under the kitchen sink for the tool box my father had assembled for me, though only he ever used them when he came to make a repair for me or for Mrs. Hanson. I found a small set of bolt cutters in there Dad had used to trim the branches that had been scratching at my bedroom window at night (though now I wondered if it had been the seraph, reaching for me in dreams). Gingerly, I approached him at the table.

  Rather than assume a defensive attitude, he bowed his head, submissive, inviting me to shear away his painful tethers.

  I started with a thin chain holding a weight to the clasp in one wing. I grunted as I forced the handles together, and the weight thumped into a nest of bath towels I had set underneath to dull its fall. Encouraged, I moved on to the other weights.

  Now I examined the barbs in him more closely and realized that they were wed with his flesh so intimately that I didn’t dare try to snip them, so the best I could do was cut the chains or remnants of chains depending from them. In order to do this, I couldn’t help but touch him, and the first time my hand brushed his skin we both flinched, but he did not protest, and I went on to finish my work.

  When my arms grew too tired he gently took the cutters from me and broke the last few chain fragments off their hooks himself, then he handed the tool back to me with a smile of gratitude and a relief so deep I nearly broke into tears. I had to look away from him, go back to pour a fresh coffee. I offered him a taste but he raised a palm to decline, and declined all nourishment I offered later, including water.

  After a few sips of my coffee, however, I put down the mug and offered him my hand. He rose, and I led him into the bathroom.

  I filled the tub with steaming water but he seemed hesitant to enter it, and I didn’t want to alarm him, so delicately I urged him into a kneeling position, and then knelt down beside him. I soaked a large sea sponge, and then began running it gently along his folded wings, washing layers of dried blood out from under and between the feathers, so that the floor tiles pooled with pinkish water. I didn’t care. And as I bathed his wings, he made a great effort to unfold them. I could tell it agonized him. The bathroom was also too small to contain them. I made him follow me into the kitchen and kneel down once more, and I filled a plastic basin with soapy water. This time he spread his trembling wings to their full span, and remarkably they filled the room, nearly touching opposite walls, majestic and black, narrow and tapered like those of a falcon. His shoulders shook with the strain of holding them aloft for me, and in reverence I stroked them with the sponge. And then I realized that his shoulders were shaking harder because he was sobbing. Whether he was sobbing in pain or in gratitude I could not know, but I put down the sponge and began to smooth his feathers under my bare palms, as if I thought this alone might balm his pain somehow. Without really willing it, I began to run my hands down to his back, where I caressed his marred white flesh.

  He rose, turned to face me, tears streaking his face. They were tears of blood, making the whites of his eyes glisten red as well. But I took his hand, and followed him from the room.

  I didn’t reach out from the bed to shut off the light. I didn’t care if he saw my legs. I was too intent on seeing him.

  As we made love some of the barbs still in him scratched me, even drew blood, but in our passion I was needless, and it only made me feel closer to his pain, closer to him, merged as we had been in dream. He raised himself on his arms to look at where our flesh was joined, and then stared down at my eyes, and again his great wings spread, almost to their fullness, making a canopy over us. I kissed the brands on his chest to cool them, licked his nipples despite the rings pierced through them, slicing my tongue on their edges. When we kissed he sucked the blood from my tongue, and I in turn licked the blood from his face, kissed the blood from his eyes. Then he arched his back and moaned in climax, the first sound I had heard him utter. When he collapsed upon me, spent, his wings covered both of us in a blanket.

  When at last he stirred he lay half atop me, his face almost shy with reverence as he stroked my breasts, my belly. Moving off me further to stroke me lower down, at last he noticed my legs, and I tried to take his chin and angle his face away. Instead, he gently slipped out of my fingers and shifted to the end of the bed. Bending over my legs, he lightly kissed my shattered knees, and then slowly began to trace his tongue along the white scar that wound up one thigh. I put my hands to his head to move him away, but then they held him there instead, as his tongue moved from the source of my pain to the source of my pleasure.

  I did not go to my classes for several more days.

  After those several days, Mrs. Hanson called to check in on me, since she hadn’t seen me about. I told her I had a slight bug. She asked if the brothers had come upstairs to see me. “Brothers?” I asked.

  “From the monastery, I think,” she said. “I think they were monks. Priests, maybe; they had collars. They wanted to know if I’d seen anyone strange around the yard. I guess there’s a brother they keep locked up because he’s ill or something. I don’t know why they don’t have him in the hospital but I guess they’d rather care for him themselves…”

  “Did he escape?” I asked, my heart blundering through its actions.

  “Yes, the other night when it stormed.”

  When I made love with the seraph that night my passion was clouded with fear for him. Lying in bed beside him, I
begged him to talk to me, to tell me his story, to tell me about his former captors, the monks. And after a while of coaxing, he did try to tell me, but he spoke in tongues. Not in a frenzied rapture, however; his voice was deep, somnambulant, like a single voice lifted from a Gregorian chant. It was both weirdly beautiful and terrifying, and I put my finger tips to his lips to stop him.

  I couldn’t avoid my former life forever, despite my fears, and after a week I returned to my classes. The first day was difficult, and I came back to check on him several times, but he was fine, either looking through the pictures in books or napping or stroking Virgil in his lap. The monks would believe him gone from the area by this time, I thought, and my unease lessened.

  And then one evening I came home to find Mrs. Hanson dead on the landing outside my apartment door.

  She was unmarked, but her eyes stared upward, glassy. The door frame was splintered, and I burst into the apartment with my blood roaring through my head.

  At first I thought my vision was blackening, until I realized it was the blood sprayed and splashed upon the walls, Virgil sitting on the backrest of the couch contentedly licking the blood that matted his fur. I stifled a scream at the carnage strewn on the floor of the parlor. Two ruins, which appeared to have once been men, and which appeared from their shredded black garb to have once been clerics of some kind. My seraph still crouched over one of them, the corpse’s head cradled in his lap. Alarmed, he looked up with a lupine snarl, his teeth coated thickly in gore, and I knew that this was the sight that had stopped the old heart of dear Mrs. Hanson.

  Trembling, relieved and horrified at once, I pulled the door shut behind me and managed to bolt it. Despite my terrible nausea, my feverish dizziness, I was not afraid of him. And he, also, stopped his savage growling when he recognized me. He lowered his head, as though ashamed, and lowered the mauled red ball of the monk’s head to the floor. I saw a dagger near this corpse, and a bottle of holy water spilled by the other, soaking into an already red-soaked throw rug.