Visitants - [Anthology]

by Ed By Stephen Jones

  The angel was appropriately impressed by the tidiness of Molly’s room, although it represented a very modest victory over the forces of chaos. She’d moved the wardrobe to cover up the corner where the mold kept growing on the wall, and she’d put the rug she’d salvaged from a skip over the shiny grease patch on the carpet. The bed was made and there wasn’t a single item of clothing draped over the back of the chair. Only the curtains were seriously disgusting, and she couldn’t be expected to take them to the launderette. The angel didn’t even glance at the curtains; a true representative of the Good, he let his eyes wander over the piles of books stacked—almost neatly—under the window, at the foot of the bed and all around the sink.

  “Burglars never pinch books,” she told him. “No point. And before you ask, I haven’t read them all. I picked most of them up going through the boxes people leave at the side when the recycling bin gets too full, and I always figure it’s better to take the ones that you might never get around to reading than leave anything you might regret not having picked up when you run out of ones you’re actually keen on. Anyway, big thick paperbacks make bloody good draught-excluders.”

  The angel turned to look at her, more appraisingly than before. Molly was alarmed to note that the summer sky had already begun to fade from his eyes. At what point, she wondered, would he pass the point of no return? And what would happen to him then? Would he have to fight just to hang on to human status? Could he hang on to human status, if that became his fallback position, or would he just keep on sliding, all the way to Lucifer and Hell?

  When the angel sat down on the bed, slumping like Annie after a bad abduction experience or Francine after an extra-generous hit, Molly knew that she had her work cut out, but it was too late to complain. She’d already accepted the responsibility.

  Maybe, she thought, this was the best way to make a new start—not by grabbing something new for yourself but by doing something new for someone else. Maybe, in the great cosmic scheme of things, you were supposed to build up a little moral credit before you could get the go-ahead to turn your own life around. If so, this was going to take even more imagination and ingenuity than letting Elvis down gently.

  ~ * ~

  “I suppose you’ve tried praying?” Molly said, dispiritedly.

  “I’ve tried,” the angel said, “but I seem to have lost the knack.” He looked up at her with his wonderful blue eyes, as if he were expecting a sympathetic pat on the head. Molly had to resist the temptation to join him. Now that he’d taken his raincoat off, his relatively unspoiled suit made him look way too good for this kind of environment, and she couldn’t bear the prospect of seeing him flinch and move away if her cellulite should accidentally come into contact with his thigh.

  “I think I tried it myself once,” she said. “Way back when. It didn’t do any good, even though I was still a virgin and didn’t understand the chorus of ‘Ebenezer Good.’ Maybe I couldn’t take it seriously enough— but lack of faith is one problem you shouldn’t have. I suppose there’s no point in asking what God’s like. He’s not like anything, is he? He just is.”

  “That’s right,” said the angel.

  “Thought so. You haven’t a fucking clue, have you? Down here, you’re completely out of your depth.”

  Because she was looking him right in the eye she saw the color weaken when she pronounced the obscenity, and was stricken by the terrible thought that if this was a test, she must be more than halfway to failing by now whether she stooped to further obscenity or not. She was suddenly struck by a sense of awkward urgency. This was Earth, after all, and time was of the essence here. The angel probably couldn’t stand much more exposure to the forces of change and decay—and as soon as she’d condescended to notice his presence in the world she’d become time’s accomplice, aiding and abetting its patient assault on his divinity. If she wasn’t part of the solution, she was part of the problem. She couldn’t just wash her hands of this one.

  As that revelation roughly took hold of her, Molly felt that she would have given anything in the world for the answer to the angel’s problem to be easy. Love would have been so easy, but she already knew that it wasn’t even worth a try. She knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that if she could only get the angel to take the least little bit of pleasure in her, she could do it with love and not just with lust, but she also knew far better than he did—with luck, far better than he ever would—where the limitations of reality lay.

  It had been easier by far with Elvis. Elvis, immortality serum or no immortality serum, had already been finished. The angel, God bless him, hadn’t even started. No matter what his timeless experience in Heaven had been like, and no matter what it was that had caused God to knock him down, the angel hadn’t even begun. Molly supposed that you had to get used to being in time before you could get to grips with beginning, and that the angel simply hadn’t had long enough, or help enough, even to think about what it would mean to pull himself back together.

  “Well,” she said, slightly startled by the desperation in her voice, “there are a few more things that aren’t even worth trying. I think we can take it for granted that Prozac isn’t the answer in this particular case, and Freudian analysis wouldn’t get us anywhere even if we had the time. We need a fix that’s quick, but one that isn’t chemical.” She nearly added and doesn’t involve fucking but she caught herself in time. She didn’t want to labor the point, or deepen the blue of his eyes any further than it was already deepened. Hastily, she added: “It might help if you could bring yourself to tell me exactly why you stand in need of absolution.” No sooner had she said it, however, than she jumped to the conclusion that it probably wouldn’t.

  “I fell,” said the angel, yet again.

  There was nothing in the least infuriating about the repetition, because the pathos wrapped up in the remark was still undergoing a stage-by-stage metamorphosis that had not yet reached its heartrending end.

  That had to be the key, Molly thought. That had to be the vital clue, the vital cue, the vital Q to which she was required to find the A.

  “I’m stupid, aren’t I?” Molly whispered. “You keep telling me what the matter is, and I just keep missing it. I keep getting hung up on the questions that don’t have any answers, like where you fell from and what made you fall, but the real point is that you’re still falling, faster and faster, into time and into place and into the vortex of creation. Of course you don’t know why, because there is no why in Heaven. All the worldly whys are in Hell, aren’t they? Every last one.”

  “I don’t know,” said the angel, proving her point.

  Molly realized that when she had first seen the angel he had been over six feet tall. Even in the library he’d topped five-seven, but now he was no taller than she was. In a matter of hours, he’d be no bigger than a child, but he’d still be too old to grow wings and fly, even in his imagination—and her presence was making it worse. Her nearness was accelerating the process. She was a carrier of time and place, and she was furthering the angel’s infection with every breath she took, but she knew that it wouldn’t do any good at all to send him back out on to the street. There were five billion people in the great wide world, and they had thousands of years of history in them, and the people closest to hand were as riddled and raddled with contagion as all the rest.

  In spite of her resolution, Molly sat down on the bed, next to the angel. He didn’t reach out to her, but at least he didn’t move away. He wasn’t afraid.

  She closed her eyes, as if she were a little girl confronted with a birthday cake or some other everyday prodigy, who had to close her eyes to make a wish if she were to stand any chance at all of making it come true.

  “I’ll tell you a funny thing about the human brain, Mr. Angel,” she said, speaking out of the darkness. “There are any number of ways to jolt it out of everyday misery, and all of them work for a while, but you can never get more than the merest delusory glimpse of Heaven. If you do something like heroin the brain
just stops producing happy chemicals of its own, so when you try to give it up you just go crazy. It’s different with Es and acid, but not so very different. Whatever the stuff gives you, you stop giving yourself, and when you stop doing the stuff because the effect’s worn thin, you’ve lost it. People think it’s just drugs, but it isn’t. It’s the same with everything you do that allows you to grasp the merest atom of delight. Fucking, dreaming, reading, kids . . . everything. Whatever gets you an inch nearer to Heaven only tantalizes once or twice, and then it starts to become as ordinary as anything else, and leaves you without the ability to do it for yourself if you don’t get the fix—and if you can’t handle that, you just go crazy.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what Heaven is really like, Mr. Angel, and I can’t tell you anything about Hell, but I can tell you this: if you intend to stay here, you have to be able to handle it without going crazy. You have to realize that everything you try, everything you do and everything you think of will only seem to work once or twice, and that the best you can hope for afterwards is that things will stay ordinary. If you can’t help going crazy, everything you think and feel and do thereafter will be a matter of trying to get back to the beginning, of trying to hold on without shrinking any further and losing any more—because time leads nowhere except death, and you just have to learn to handle that, and get what you can out of a world without a Heaven. If you came here thinking that time heals, forget it, because time wastes. If you came here looking for a place to be, you shouldn’t have bothered, because there’s no place like home—and I don’t mean that there’s no place like home, I mean that there’s no place even remotely like what you’d really like to think of as home, but you have to get used to that and make do with what there is, one way or another. You just have to get used to it, and make do with what there is, or else you get crazier and crazier and crazier until there’s nothing left at all. Down here, you have to accept things as they are if you want to make a new start, because there’s no other way to begin. Even in year zero, you have to see things as they are. There’s no other way, except to oblivion.

  “So if I were you, Mr. Angel, I’d stop fucking around down here where you don’t belong and go back where you came from, where you don’t have any time to waste or any place to call anything. It doesn’t matter how or why you fell—what you have to do is get up again, while you still can. If you don’t, you’ll become just as human as the rest of us, and the only way to get up will be the hard way. That’s the choice: either you get back up, right now, or you stay here and rot. Just do it. I know it’s the most difficult thing in the world, but that’s all there is to it, and all there can be to it. It’s what all of us have to do, one way or another. I’m going to open my eyes now, and I want to see you gone.”

  Molly knew, even before she opened her eyes, that the angel would be gone, and so he was—because he was still an angel, even if his wings had gone into hiding. She had pronounced far too many obscenities to sustain the sky in his eyes. She had shown him darkness, and she had scared him as shitless as only an entity that didn’t need food as such could be.

  She wished that someone had done as much for her, way back when, although she knew perfectly well that she wouldn’t have been able to take it in. Whatever else she’d been, she was no angel—but whatever she’d been, this was year zero and she was now the kind of person who could touch an angel and do him a good turn. She had to be. There wasn’t any other option left.

  She also knew, though, even before she got down to the serious business of planning the rest of her day, that she would probably never know for sure whether she had passed the test, if it actually had been a test, or whether the angel really had decided to go back to the place from which he had fallen instead of all the way to Hell. In her experience, people mostly did go back to the place from which they had fallen, if they only could—and she now had no good reason to suppose that angels were any different—although sometimes, like little anorectic Annie, they simply couldn’t.

  That was why, when people like her said “I fell,” it was hardly ever a lie—but that was why people like her who still had it in them to get-up again did get up, even though they had no way to do it but the hard way.

  <>

  * * * *

  S.D. WATKINS, PAINTER OF PORTRAITS

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  STEVE RASIMIC TEM’s latest book is a collection of all his collaborations with wife Melanie Tem: In Concert, published by Centipede Press. He has recent and forthcoming stories in Crimewave, Null Immortalis, The Black Book of Horror, Asimov’s and the anthology Werewolves and Shape Shifters, edited by John Skipp.

  “In the early stages of thinking about a story I find that stray, rather disparate ideas may wander into the net,” reveals the author. “I’m often not sure how they’re going to fit, or if they’re nothing more than some random distraction.

  “In this case I gave the protagonist my own suspicion of complex metaphor (believing it usually hides something we’re not meant to know). And I’ve often wondered about the painters of classical religious art, or anyone devoting their lives to what some would call ‘imaginary beings.’

  “I suppose we could consider fantasy and horror writers as part of that category (the devotees, not the imaginary beings).”

  THE OLD PRIEST WAS DRUNK, but Watkins did not think he would pass out soon. The priest was pouring himself his sixth, or seventh glass of wine. The portrait painter had been so engrossed in his sketches of too many lines, too many choices, that he had lost count. But he had carefully watered the wine down beforehand so that the priest would get drunk, yet still remain conscious through this, the first portrait sitting.

  Watkins himself did not drink at all, but after hours of intense drawing he would not have called himself sober. He watched as his wounded hand made lines that leapt away from the body, rose from the shoulders as if the old priest’s arthritic joints and twisted bones were reforming themselves into something that might launch the failing body toward Heaven. Here and there his blood spotted the page.

  “So many lines, why do you make so many lines? Did they teach you that in art school?” The priest’s boozy breath against the side of his face made him feel ill.

  Watkins twisted in his chair. “I told you this is all preparation. I begin the painting tomorrow. This is nothing for you to see. You should be in your chair—this is a portrait sitting, remember? You should be sitting, posing.”

  The priest staggered back to his chair in front of the fire, his voluminous black cassock casting broad shadows over Watkin’s front room, alternating with the warm, sudden flushes of firelight. It brought an otherworldly illumination to the paintings covering every inch of the walls: all of them of angels in various poses, all of them gorgeous, and none of them by Watkins himself. They had all been painted by his father Martin, who had been a genius.

  The priest had his hand affectionately around the wine bottle, gazing at this patchwork hallucination of angelic obsession. “When I came here looking for a painter, I thought it would be your father.”

  “The fact that no one at St. Anthony’s knew my father has been dead more than ten years speaks volumes.”

  The priest nodded sadly, tipping dangerously forward. “He painted most of the murals in the church, and the fine details in the transepts. Admirers come from thousands of miles.”

  “And for which he was seriously underpaid.” Watkins raised his hand against the possible response. “I did not say the church cheated him. St. Anthony’s gave him what he asked for. But it was far too little pay for an artist of his genius, as his children and widow would be happy to tell you. I am not my father. Myself, I can only paint what I can see. I have come to be satisfied with that. I’m certainly good enough to paint a portrait for the church hall, which I will do for a modest fee, but one appropriate to my level of talent.”

  “Is this why you do not attend Mass, my son?”

  Watkins bridled at the term, but said nothi
ng immediately. Instead he focused on the lines framing the priest’s nose, his ill-proportioned ears, the deceptively simple crack of a mouth. He made ten lines where only one was required. His father used to admonish him, It betrays a lack of faith, Son. Make the single line with confidence, then go on to the next. In time they will be the right lines, if you persist.

  “I enjoy the searching for a final image,” he said now, to the priest. “That is why I make so many lines.”

  “And yet you say you draw only what you can see.”

  “I do. But in the face there is every person you used to be, and every person you will become. The lines, the planes, are all there. I draw what I see, but sometimes I think I see too much.”

  “And this was your father’s method as well?”

  Watkins kept his face calm, composed, even as the evolving shape on his sketch pad erupted, lines spinning off cheekbones, lines twirling off that nasty, no-lipped mouth that spat out the priest’s portion of their conversation, hair lines and skin lines and ley lines transversing the page, transmuting, leaving mysterious pockets where eyes might take seed and grow. “My father needed no framework—he was like God’s camera. His lines, his proportions, all perfection. Michelangelo, Da Vinci, they might have learned a thing or two from my father. He painted angels with flesh the texture of air, captured their flight on the end of his brush and suffused his colors with their yearning spirits.