Shining in the Dark

by Shining in the Dark- Celebrating 20 Years of Lilja's Library (retail) (epub)

  attracting undue attention.

  So January it was. January 17, in fact; a Friday. A damp, cold, misty Friday; ideal circumstances for a discreet apotheosis. Raymond Pocock, the saint-to-be, lived in a pleasant but ill-lit street fully a quarter-mile from Crouch End’s main thoroughfare, and given that by four in the afternoon the rain-clouds had conspired with dusk to drive all but the dregs of light from the sky, nobody even saw the angel Sophus Demdarita come calling.

  Sophus was no naïf when it came to the business at hand. The child-healer Pocock would be the third soul she had removed from the hylic to the etheric conditions in a little over a year. But this afternoon there was error in the air. No sooner had she stepped into Raymond’s squalid flat—intending to claim him silently—than his gaudy parrot, perched upon the window-sill, rose up shrieking in alarm. Pocock sluggishly attempted to hush it, but the bird’s din had already set the occupants of the flat below and beside his yelling for some hush. When they didn’t get it they came to the Saint’s front door, threatening both bird and owner alike, and one—finding the door unlocked—threw it open.

  Sophus was a pacifist. Though there were many amongst the Sublime Throng who enjoyed causing a little mayhem if they could get away with it, Sophus’s father had been a legionnaire during the Purge of Dis, and had told his daughter such gruesome tales of those massacres that she could not now picture blood-letting of any sort without nausea. So instead of dispatching the witnesses at the door which would have solved so many problems—Sophus attempted to snatch Pocock from his sordid state with sufficient speed and light that those at the threshold would not believe what they had seen.

  First she bathed the joyless room in such a blaze of beatific light that the witnesses were obliged to cover their eyes and retreat into the grimy hall. Then she embraced the good man Raymond and laid upon his forehead the kiss of canonization. At her touch his marrow evaporated and his flesh lost all but its spiritual weight. Finally, she lifted him up, dissolving with a glance the ceiling, beams and roof above them, and took him away into paradise.

  The witnesses, speechless with confusion and fear, hurried away to their rooms and locked their doors to keep this wonder from coming in pursuit of them. The house grew still. The rain fell, and the night came with it.

  In the Many Mansions Saint Raymond of Crouch End was received with much glory and rhetoric. He was bathed, dressed in raiments so fine they made him weep, and invited before the Throne to speak of his good deeds. When he protested mildly that it would he immodest for him to list his achievements, he was told that modesty had been invented by the Fallen One to encourage men to think less of themselves, and that he should have no fear of censure for his boasts.

  Though it was less than an hour since he’d been sitting in his room composing a poem on the tragedy of flesh, that squalid state was already a decaying memory. Asked to recall the living creatures with whom he had shared that room, it is unlikely he would have been able to name them, and unlikelier still that he’d have recognized them now.

  ‘Will you look at me?’ the parrot said, peering at himself in the tiny mirror which had been the Saint’s one concession to vanity. ‘What the hell’s happened?’ His feathers lay in a bright pile beneath his perch. The flesh their shedding had revealed was scabby and tight, and it itched like the Devil, but he wasn’t displeased. He had arms and legs. He had pudenda hanging in his belly’s shadow that were impressively large. He had eyes in the front of his head, and a mouth (beneath a beakish nose) which made words that were not some babble recited by rote, but his own invention. ‘I’m human,’ he said. ‘By Jesu,

  I’m human!’

  He was not addressing an empty room. Sitting in the far corner, having first shed her shell and then swelled to four feet eleven, was the sometime tortoise Theresa, a gift to Raymond from a little girl who had been cured of a stammer by the Saint’s tender ministrations.

  ‘How did this happen?’ the parrot, who’d been dubbed Pidgin by Raymond in recognition of its poor English, wanted to know.

  Theresa raised her grey head. She was both bald and uncommonly ugly, her flesh as wrinkled and scaly in this new incarnation as ever it had been in her old. ‘He was taken by an angel,’ she said. ‘And we were somehow altered by its presence. She stared down at her crabbed hands. ‘I feel so naked,’ she said. ‘You are naked,’ Pidgin replied. ‘You’ve lost your shell and I’ve lost my feathers. But we’ve gained so much.’ ‘I wonder …’ Theresa said. ‘What do you wonder?’ ‘Whether we’ve gained much at all.

  Pidgin went to the window, and put his fingers on the cold glass. ‘Oh, there’s so much to see out there,’ he murmured.

  ‘It looks pretty miserable from here, ‘God in Heaven—’

  ‘Hold your tongue,’ Theresa snapped. ‘Somebody could be listening.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Parrot, think! It wasn’t the Lord’s intention that we be transfigured this way. Are we agreed on that?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘So if you raise your voice to Heaven, even in a casual curse, and someone up there hears your cry—’

  ‘They may turn us back into animals?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Then we should get out of here as quickly as possible. Find ourselves some of Saint Raymond’s clothes and go out into

  the world.’

  Twenty minutes later they were standing on Crouch End, perusing a copy of the Evening Standard they’d plucked from a waste-bin. People hurried past them through the drizzle, scowling, muttering and pushing them as they passed. ‘Are we in their way?’ Theresa wanted to know. ‘Is that the problem?’ ‘They just don’t notice us, that’s all. If I were standing here in my feathers—’ ‘you’d he locked up as a freak.’ Theresa replied. She returned to the business of reading. ‘Terrible things,’ she sighed. ‘Everywhere. Such terrible things.’ She passed the paper over to Pidgin. ‘Murdered children. Burning hotels. Bombs in toilet bowls. It’s one atrocity after another. I think we should find ourselves some little island, where neither man nor angel will find us.’ ‘And turn our backs on all of this?’ Pidgin said, spreading his arms and catching a young lady with his fingers. ‘Watch your fucking hand,’ she snarled, and hurried on. ‘They don’t notice us, huh?’ Theresa said. ‘I think they see us very well.’ ‘The rain has dampened their spirits,’ Pidgin said. ‘They’ll brighten up once it clears.’ ‘You’re an optimist, parrot,’ Theresa murmured fretfully. ‘And that could well be the death of you.’ ‘Why don’t we find ourselves something to eat?’ Pidgin suggested, taking hold of Theresa’s arm. There was a supermarket a hundred yards from where they stood, its bright windows glittering in the puddled pavement. ‘We look grotesque,’ Theresa objected. ‘They’ll lynch us if they see us too clearly.’ ‘You’re dressed badly, it’s true,’ Pidgin replied. ‘I, on the other hand, bring a touch of glamour to my dress.’ He had chosen from Raymond’s wardrobe the best copy of his feathers he could find, but what upon his back had been a glorious display of natural beauty was now a motley of gaud and fat. As for Theresa, she too had found an approximation of her former state, heaping upon her spine enough thick coats and cardigans (all greys and greens) that she was bent almost double by their weight. ‘I suppose if we keep to ourselves we might get away with our lives,’ Theresa said. ‘So do you want to go in or not?’ Theresa shrugged. ‘I am hungry.’ she murmured. They furtively slipped inside and sloped up and down the aisles, choosing indulgences: biscuits, chocolates, nuts, carrots and a large bottle of the cherry brandy Raymond had been secretly addicted to since the previous September. Then they wandered up the hill and found themselves a bench outside Christchurch, close to the summit of Crouch End Hill. Though the trees around the building were bare, the mesh of their branches offered the wanderers some protection from the rain, and there they sat to nibble, drink and debate their freedom. ‘I feel a great responsibility.’ Theresa said. ‘You do?’ said Pidgin, claiming the brandy bottle from her scaly fingers. ‘Wh
y, exactly?’ ‘Isn’t it obvious? We’re walking proof of miracles. We saw a saint ascend—’ ‘and we saw his deeds,’ Pidgin added. ‘All those children, those pretty little girls, healed by his goodness. He was a great man.’ ‘They didn’t enjoy the healing much, I think,’ Theresa observed, ‘they wept a lot.’ ‘They were cold, most likely. What with their being naked, and his hands being clammy.’ ‘And perhaps he was a little clumsy with his fingers. But he was a great man. Just as you say. Are you done with the brandy?’ Pidgin handed the bottle—which was already half empty—back to his companion. ‘I saw his fingers slip a good deal,’ the parrot-man went on. ‘Usually…’ ‘Usually?’ ‘…well, now I think of it, always…’ ‘Always?’ ‘He was a great man.’ ‘Always?’ ‘Between the legs.’ They sat in silence for a few moments, turning this over.

  ‘You know what?’ Theresa finally said

  ‘What?’ ‘I suspect our Uncle Raymond was a filthy degenerate.’ Another long silence. Pidgin stared up through the branches at the starless sky. ‘What if they find him out?’ ‘That depends if you believe in Divine Forgiveness or not.’ Theresa took another mouthful of brandy. ‘Personally, I think we may not have seen the last of our Raymond.’

  The Saint never knew what his error was; never knew whether it was an unseemly glance at a cherubim, or the way he sometimes stumbled on the word child that gave him away. He only knew that one moment he was keeping the company of luminous souls whose every step ignited stars, the next their bright faces were gazing upon him with rancour, and the air which had filled his breast with bliss had turned to birch twigs and was beating him bloody.

  He begged for sympathy; begged and begged. His desires had overcome him, he admitted, but he had resisted them as best he could. And if on occasion he’d succumbed to a shameful fever, was that beyond forgiveness? In the grand scheme of things, he had surely done more good than bad.

  The birches did not slow their tattoo by a beat. He was driven to his knees, sobbing. Let me go, he finally told the Sublime Throng, I relinquish my sainthood here and now. Punish me no more just send me home. The rain had stopped by eight forty-

  five, and by nine, when Sophus Demdarita brought Raymond back to his humble abode, the clouds were clearing. Moonlight washed the room where he’d healed half a hundred little girls, and where half a hundred times he’d sobbed in shame. It lit the puddles on the carpet, where the rain had poured through the gaping roof. It lit too the empty wooden box where his tortoise had lived, and the pile of feathers beneath Pidgin’s perch. ‘You bitch!’ he said to the angel. ‘What did you do to them?’ ‘Nothing,’ Sophus replied. She already suspected the worst. ‘Stay quite still or you’ll confuse me.’

  Fearing another beating. Raymond froze and as the angel frowned and murmured the empty air gave up ghosts of the past. Raymond saw himself, rising from his sonnets, as a syrup of hallowed light announced some heavenly presence. He saw the parrot fly up from its perch in alarm; saw the door thrown open as the neighbours came to complain and saw them retreat from the threshold in awe and terror.

  The recollection grew frenetic now, as Sophus became more impatient to solve this mystery. The ethereal forms of angel and man rose through the roof, and Raymond turned his gaze upon the conjured images of Pidgin and Theresa. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘What’s happening to them?’ The parrot was thrashing as if possessed, its plumage dropping out as its flesh swelled and seethed. The tortoise’s shell cracked as she too grew larger, giving up her reptilian state for an anatomy that looked more human by

  the moment.

  ‘What have I done?’ Sophus murmured, ‘God in Heaven, what have I done?’ She turned on the sometime Saint. ‘I blame you for this,’ she said. ‘You distracted me with your tears of gratitude. And now I’m obliged to do what I promised my father I would never do.’

  ‘What’s that?’ ‘Take a life,’ Sophus replied, watching the speeding images closely. The parrot and the tortoise were stealing clothes, and making for the door. The angel followed. ‘Not one life,’ it said mournfully. ‘Two. It must be as though this error was never made.’

  * * *

  The streets of north London are not known for miracles. Murder they had seen, and rape, and riot. But revelation? That was for High Holborn and Lambeth. True, there has been an entity with the body of a chow-chow and the head of Winston Churchill reported in Finsbury Park, but this unreliable account was the closest the region had come to having a visitation since the fifties.

  Until tonight. Tonight, for the second time within the space of five hours, miraculous lights appeared, and on this occasion (the rain having passed, and the balmier air having coaxed

  revellers abroad) they did not go unnoticed.

  Sophus was in too much of a hurry to be stealthy. She passed along the Broadway in the form of a hovering bonfire, startling atheists from their ease and frightening believers into catechisms. A stupefied solicitor, witnessing this fiery passage from his office window, called both the police and the fire department. By the time Sophus Demdarita was at the bottom of Crouch End Hill there were sirens in the air. ‘I hear music,’ said Theresa. ‘You mean alarms.’ ‘I mean music.’ She rose from the bench, bottle in hand, and turned towards the modest church behind them. From inside came the sound of a choir in full throat. ‘What is it they’re singing?’ ‘A Requiem,’ Theresa replied, and started up the steps towards the church. ‘Where the fuck are you going?’ ‘To listen,’ Theresa said. ‘At least leave me the…’ He didn’t get to the word brandy. The sirens had drawn his gaze back towards the bottom of the hill, and there, flooding the asphalt, he saw Sophus Demdarita’s light. ‘Theresa?’ he murmured.

  Getting no reply, he glanced back towards his companion. Unaware of their jeopardy, she was at the side porch, reaching open the door.

  Pidgin yelled a warning—or at least tried to—but when he raised his voice something of the bird that he’d been surfaced, and the cry became a strangled squawk. Even if she had comprehended his words Theresa was deaf to them, transported by the Requiem’s din. In a moment, she was gone from sight.

  Pidgins first instinct was to run; to put as much distance as he could between his new-fangled flesh and the Angel that wanted to unmake him. But if he fled now, and the divine messenger did Theresa some fatal harm, what was left for him? A life lived in hiding, fearful of every light that passed his window; a life in which he dared not confess the miracle that had transformed him for fear some witless Christian divulged his whereabouts to God? That was a pitiful way to exist. Better to face the vile undoer now, with Theresa at his side.

  He started up the steps with a bound, and the Angel, catching sight of him in the shadows, picked up its speed, ascending the hill at a run, its flaming body seeming to grow with every stride. Gasping with panic, Pidgin raced to the porch, flung open the door and stumbled inside.

  A wave of melancholy came to greet him from the far end of the church, where perhaps sixty choristers were assembled in front of the altar, singing some song of death. Theresa glanced ’round at him, her dark eyes brimming with tears. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said. ‘The Angel.’ ‘Yes, I know. It’s come for us,’ she said, glancing back at the stained-glass window behind them, A fiery light was burning outside, and shafts of purple, blue and red fell around the fugitives. ‘It’s no use running. We’re better off enjoying the music, until the end.’

  The choir had not given up its Libera Me, despite the brightening blaze. Transported by the music, most of the singers continued to give of their best, believing perhaps that this glory was a glimpse of transcendence, induced by the Requiem. Instead of losing power, the music swelled as the doors at the back of the church swung open and Sophus Demdarita made her entrance.

  The conductor, who until now had been blissfully unaware of what was afoot, glanced ’round. The baton fell from his fingers. The choir, suddenly unled, lost its way in the space of a bar, and the Requiem became a tattered cacophony from which the Angel’s voice rose like the whine
of a finger on the rim of a glass. ‘You,’ it said, pointing its finger at Pidgin and Theresa. ‘Come here.’ ‘Tell it to fuck off,’ Pidgin said to Theresa. ‘Come to me!’ “Theresa turned on her heels, and yelled down the aisle. ‘You there! All of you! This is God’s work you’re about to see!’ ‘Shut up,’ said the Angel. ‘She’s going to kill us, because she doesn’t want us human.’

  The choir had forsaken the Requiem entirely now. Two of the tenors were sobbing, and one of the altos had lost control of her bladder, and was splashing loudly on the marble steps. ‘Don’t look away!’ Theresa told them. ‘You have to remember this forever.’ ‘That won’t save you,’ Sophus said. Her wrists were beginning to glow. Some withering blast was undoubtedly simmering there. ‘Will you … hold my hand?’ Pidgin asked, tentatively reaching out for Theresa.

  She smiled sweetly, and slipped her hand into his. Then—though they knew they could not escape the coming fire—they began to back away from its source, like a married couple running their ceremony in reverse. Behind them, the witnesses were sloping off. The conductor had taken refuge behind the pulpit, the basses had fled, every one; one of the sobbing tenors was digging for a handkerchief while the sopranos pushed past him to make their getaway. The Angel raised her murderous hands. ‘It was fun while it lasted,’ Pidgin murmured to Theresa, turning his eyes upon her so as not to see the blast when it came.

  It didn’t come. They retreated another step, and another, and still it didn’t come. They both dared glance back towards the Angel, and found to their astonishment that Uncle Raymond had appeared from somewhere, and had thrown himself between them and the Angel’s ire. He had clearly suffered in paradise. His cloth-of-gold raiment hung in tatters. His flesh was bloodied and bruised where he’d been repeatedly struck. But he had the strength of an unforgiven man. ‘They’re innocent!’ he hollered. ‘Like little children!’