They made it to the front portal and unbarred the great oak doors, letting go just before an explosion of wind pushed in and slammed the doors against walls. They crawled to the doorway, clinging to each other as a raging firelight appeared in the black sky. Death had become Wrath, and had called millions of dead soldiers to ride with him into the abyss. Above the warriors flew the Valkyrie, and at the heels of their steeds, swirled a pack of snarling hounds.
Awestruck, the men hid their faces away, and shielded their ears from the roar of vengeance, and prayed. Even in death they knew terror. And the sky stayed black, without a star to offer hope, as though a great shroud had been draped over existence, as the army moved on and down, to the battlefield where the hell-dogs howled and yapped their alerts.
Like lead drawn through butter, the first line of defense fell in seconds as overwhelming numbers rode over it, impaling dogs and demons on the glowing swords. The souls of the damned danced in misguided delight, believing heaven had come to rescue them, but their hope was dashed as the warriors crushed them underneath the hooves of their heavenly horses.
"Help us!" they cried. "We recant! We repent!" But their cries went unheeded. It was not Death's mandate to forgive sins, but to bring back sovereignty to the Spirit World and protect the human spirits under his protection. Even the fallen angels were ground underfoot, their bodies left torn and bleeding in the dung mires of the underworld before they could draw their weapons.
“See what you’ve done!” Satan bellowed to Medusa and grew and grew a hundred feet to meet the oncoming hoard, grew until the serpent woman was no bigger than a worm. He scooped her up, and the Sirens in his iron fists and flung them upwards into the vast net of the Valkyrie, screaming “Take them and good riddance!”
But Death rode towards him, enveloping him in the folds of his cape, blinding him to the attack. Flailing and cursing, Satan fought the suffocating darkness that surrounded him. He didn’t see the Fierce One’s face or the arm that wielded the Raphael’s flaming golden sword that severed Satan’s right horn with one swipe of the blade.
Satan staggered. Was the spurting pus he felt on his face his own? He couldn’t tell, but before he could recover his footing, another blow severed his left horn. He crashed to the undulating ground like a felled tree, his hands clawing at his head wounds. And when the pain of realization became too much to bear, he stuck his head into a mountain top to blot out the barrage of battle noise. The purge was quick and precise. A thousand demons for each short-circuited life.
When the nets were full, the army turned back, hauling the entangled demons to the Swallows, the true hell for those desiring to serve the Master of Evil and torture the damned.
****
Henceforth every demon who violates the Spirit World’s sovereignty will become its prisoner. Hell has it purpose—to let the damned punish themselves—but its denizens cannot disturb the serenity of the Godly Spirits.
DEATH
Satan crumpled the scroll with Death's decree, and tossed it into the Lake of fire. On its banks, a retinue of naked lovers willing to replace the slimy Medusa, danced and cavorted obscenely seeking his notice, but he was not amused by their lurid gyrations. He was no longer horny, only well-warned of his limitations. Lucrezia stroked his temples. The Great Horned God had become the Two Crusty Noded Vanquished Coward. He could hear the giggles of his minions—laughter that wouldn’t stop until his horns grew back, a constant reminder that the brave served the good while the disloyal damned weren’t worth a turd.
“Of course you miss Medusa,” Iago said, “there’s not another like her. But your pain is her fault. She was jealous of Bianca. Why should she have the love of four men, while most women are lucky to have the love of one? Medusa was always unhappy. Always complaining. Death will return her to you—believe me.”
Iago’s words were comforting. All the upheaval in the Spirit World began with that would-be hero, that irritating, upstart Guardian and his love for that insufferable woman who was more detestable dead than alive. “Leave me, all of you!” Satan commanded, and went into his chamber, alone. “Is that you, Iago?”
“Yes, Master. See here. I’ve brought you what you asked for.”
“Tell me which one is the least foolish.” And, ignominious as it was, Satan tried on hats before a gilt edged mirror. A derby. A beret. A jester's cap. He chose a diamond and purple velvet crown that sat low enough on his head to cover his scars, and vowed not to leave his throne until his head was no longer naked.
****
“Life and death are like that. Contradictory. Beautiful and orderly, ugly and chaotic at the same time. People make a million decisions that are more hopeful than effective, and our job is to help them cope with failure and keep hoping in spite of everything that tells them life is futile.” Monsignor Rice had delivered Father Kellen’s Easter sunrise sermon in his stead. Pleading illness, Kellan was in his bedroom praying for the Rectors, but mostly praying for himself. Rice had to say something to the man he found propped up on pillows when he should have been in his pulpit. “You’re parishioners want me to convey their regards and tell you they’re praying for you.”
“It’s true, you know. I am sick.” A tray with a bowl of cold chicken soup and cold cup of coffee sat on his desk. It was the third tray Mrs. Sullivan had brought upstairs he hadn’t touched.
Rice poured the soup and the coffee in the toilet, put the tray on the floor outside the bedroom door. “I know you were in love with Maddie Rector. Maybe you lusted after her too. Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s tough to lose people you love. Especially that way.”
“I just don’t understand why. Does God need her that bad?”
“Yes. Does that make you feel better?”
“We’re never going to know what God needs or wants, so it doesn’t matter. Is that the message?”
Rice glanced at his watch. “If you get cleaned up, we can still make the breakfast buffet at Shoney’s.”
Kellan sat on the edge of the mattress. “I’m not hungry.”
“Yes, you are. Just not for food.” He pulled Kellan up by his arm, and shoved him toward the bathroom. “Suffering, my friend is universal. Be glad you have less of it than your neighbor. If you don’t believe your Maddie’s in a better place, get another gig.”
****
Cupertino handled the media, attributing cliché’s like ‘outrageous act’, ‘deeply disturbing’, ‘tragic death of a devoted patron of the arts’ to America’s favorite living artist. Manstein arrived with greeting card sized photo albums filled with pictures of Maddie at birthday, holiday, and charity celebrations, and gave them to her grieving family. “Elise won’t make it. Stephen won’t let her fly.”
“She called. I understand. It’s okay,” Alby said. Manstein was no photographer, but the pictures, collected over a decade and arranged chronologically, were priceless. Lupe was crying as she flipped through pages, explaining the pictures to Angelo, who sat beside her and patted her hand.
“Did she tell you she wants The Lady With The Red Parasol put in a museum?”
The picture, flanked by bee’s wax candles, was placed on a table in front of the living room fireplace. The memorial service was the first time Maddie’s California friends had seen it. To the fifty people sitting in rented seating, staring at it as David delivered a eulogy, it was as if Maddie was standing before them, and not until he had finished his sermon could Father Kellan bear to look at it.
“I’ll think about it,” Alby said. The Daughter had also suggested that the picture be photographed and digitalized if Alby couldn’t part with it. Keeping it in his studio wasn’t wise. Heat. Dust. Moisture. A climate conspiracy would rob it of its glory. The Agent told him the same thing. When the shock subsided and the memorial service concluded, when the prayers were done, when the loss became emptiness and the emptiness hardened into loneliness, when the memories of "we" became things "I have to do" while I’m waiting for her to come home—then he’d have time to think about it.
Life Unfolding
Angelo listened to their words and their movements. Lupe was wiping her eyes with a tissue she removed from a plastic package. He heard her purse snap closed. Albion was sitting cross-legged, swinging his top leg nervously. He could hear cloth brush against cloth. Father Kellen was standing. His voice carried over their heads. He was turning the pages of his bible—they sounded like the soft crinkling of tissue paper being folded. Cupertino had come into the room. The scent of Polo aftershave mixed with that of freshly blown-out candle wicks. David sat next to him, smelling of cigarette smoke.
His Uncles Louis’ wake had been filled with music, and the smell of garlic and tomato sauce, and one wine toast after another, toasts that were really memories recited in public. Angelo remembered wishing he’d known Louis when he was young. Tell me about Signora Maddie, he wanted to say. Tell me she loved the smell of the sea. Tell me she loved to dance. That she loved David’s spinach dip and the chimichangas Lupe made on Saturday afternoons because these were the things she’d revealed to him when he was a child.
But no one spoke about her like a person. She was reduced to roles: good mother, a loving friend, a devoted teacher who cared about to her students. Maybe they didn’t know her. Maybe they didn’t remember her. Maybe they never noticed her. Maybe she never told them.
Upstairs, in his studio, was a block of clay with Maddie’s face inside. He’d sculpt it out and have it cast in bronze. People would not say, as they did of Albion’s painting, that it was a lovely work of art. They would not say, what beautiful colors, what wonderful technique, how much it looks like her. No, they wouldn’t just see her face, they would touch it and feel they were touching her.
“Our loved ones wait for us on the other side,” he heard Father Kellan say. He didn’t sound like he believed it. It wasn’t the proper time to ask why he didn’t believe it. He’d wait until everyone was gone. It would have to be today, though. He knew Kellan wouldn’t be back for a long time. He'd misplaced his faith. “She was a good person. We’re temped to demand God tell us why He called her home so soon, but a silent deity never answers.”
“Quoth the raven nevermore. Good grief, Kellan, don’t be so morbid. She’s in heaven and the bastard that set off the bomb is rotting in hell,” Alby said. “End of story.”
“Ayii! You’ll rot with him—you’re mean to a man of God,” Lupe said as she gathered up a stack of plates and saucers and headed for the kitchen.
David laughed and whispered in his ear. “Mom would’ve loved this—all her lovers in one room vying for her affection. As if she’d spend her time in heaven worried about geeks like them. ”
****
It was odd that Alby could voice certainty about the hereafter while the priest shouted his doubt with every Latin prayer he said. Alby didn’t go to mass, receive the sacraments, or say grace over meals. Yet, Kellan said his dream pictures meant he was in contact with a spiritual plane.
"There is a place," Alby had told Angelo when they were fishing off the jetty on a May morning, "between Heaven and Earth where strange beings meander, and show me truths about the past, present, and future." He was eleven years old. The waves lapped the rocks Alby helped him navigate, where the crabs climbed stone mountains and hid under cement awnings to sun themselves without becoming gull food. Alby had placed one in his hand so he could feel how it moved. "Truths must be told, because so long as they remain hidden, justice cannot be done. Nor any other good."
“Are you afraid to learn those truths?” he’d asked
“Not anymore. I was, once, before Maddie left. I was afraid she’d leave me for the man she loved.”
“But she left with the Baron...”
“It wasn’t him she loved. It was the man Father Kellan feared, and the man who gave the Baron the Beethoven symphony. She went to find him, but he never materialized, and she could never enter that middle realm.”
Alby’s confession confused him. “Do you believe the spirits walk among us, Signor Rector?”
“I believe we don’t know what we know.” When they got home, Alby had given him a touch-tour of his studio, letting him feel the different brushes, the canvass, the paints, and the dried acrylic. And he’d had more questions.
“How can that be? How can we forget what’s most important to us?"
“Birth is a kind of forgetting who we are before we come out of the dark cave, just like most people forget where they go in their dreams. Only I remember where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, and I paint what I remember. Does that make you afraid of me?”
“Sometimes. I hear you talking to people who aren’t there about parties, and wars, and demons. Most of the time, you’re just you.”
“I’m always me. The people I talk to, never tell me to do harm. They told me to let you come here.”
“Like the voices St. Joan heard?”
“Something very much like that.”
After that, no matter how Lupe fussed, or Father Kellan complained about the hours Alby kept, or how he neglected his appearance, or ignored good manners, Angelo was never afraid of him. But when Alby was diagnosed with Leukemia, he was afraid for him.
****
David Rector took his cameras back to L.A.. The Baron took The Lady With The Red Parasol to Elise, and accompanied her and Stephen to a reception at the Tate Gallery. Lupe made them both promise to visit Alby, confiding she had a premonition she’d be losing another loved one soon.
Angelo lay in bed, feeling the moisture-laden air roll in through the open window next to his bed, and thinking how strange it was that blind people often became invisible to others. He’d heard many private conversations because people mistook his blindness for deafness when it was really the opposite. His hearing was acute. He heard a rustling coming from Alby’s studio, and when his feet touched the cold tiles, he hunted for his slippers. They’d been swallowed by the shoe monster under the bed. He opened his cane, and stepped into the hall. If Alby was awake, he might be in the mood for cocoa and toast.
As he neared the studio door, his tiles warmed under his feet. A warm breeze brushed over his body. He opened the studio door. “Signor Rector?” There was no answer. He went to the easel, felt the chair, and sat down, stretched out his hand and felt the dry canvass.
“Angelo,” he heard a gentle voice say. “He is risen. I have seen Him.”
And Angelo could see. It was though someone had swept the dust from his eyes, and he kissed the feet of the shimmering woman who raised him up by his arms, and simply said, "Paint, Raphael."
From the doorway, Alby saw his Golden Angel, just as he had painted her, surrounded by a blue-white and yellow glow, dressed in a delicate white chemise, standing behind Angelo as he drew a woman’s face, then a torso, at the Angel’s instruction. Hours slipped by unnoticed by them all, until dawn began to light the room, but Angelo wouldn’t stop until his dream painting was done.
****
“What is it?” Father Kellan said into his cell phone. He looked at the sacristy clock: 9:AM. He’d just finished saying morning mass, and was looking forward to a breakfast of Mrs. Sullivan’s best blueberry pancakes.
“Come. Hurry. Bring the Holy Water, Father.” It was Lupe. She’d come into a sleeping household, and started her morning routine of cleaning up after one of Alby’s all-nighters. She’d gone into the studio, as she did every morning and casually glanced at whatever horrific scene Senor Rector had painted. Cupertino would call at ten, and ask if Alby was up, and could he come over to inspect his client’s latest project. But this morning what her eyes fell upon was a picture like none she’d ever seen.
When Kellan arrived, he found her on the patio, eyes pressed closed, saying her rosary. “Lupe, it’s me. What’s happened?”
She said nothing, took the scapular from around her neck, handed it to him, and pointed to the upstairs windows. Kellan braced himself for the worst and galloped into the house and up the stairs to Alby’s studio. There was no mistaking the woman in the
picture was Blessed Francesca Grasinski—her symbols were all there. White roses, so fresh and dewy it made you want to fetch a vase, and plump brown potatoes, spread out on a frayed Nazi flag dripping with innocent blood. Scrawled at the bottom was a signature: Ballesteros.
****
Charles the Charming picked up a chunk of bone with a long tweezer, dipped it in glue, and placed it on a two-thousand year old skull. Time had uncovered a grave near Cave 1, Qunran near the Dead Sea, and recognized it as the unmarked grave of Ezekial Yadim, a common soldier too young to be a cavalryman. She asked Fate if he could restore the skull, crushed by a battle axe, as Yadim was a favorite raconteur and she wished to make a gift of it to him. Fate could not refuse the request, given as he was to a love of puzzles, and had spread the splinters and chips before him on a writing desk, painstakingly reconstructing the artifact to distract his usual interfering self from the news of Death’s successful raid on Satan’s stronghold, a police action long overdue what with the plethora of demonic intrusions into the Spirit World.
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