The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (28 page)

This January morning bright and windy and he’s staring at the face floating in a mirror. Dirty mirror in a public lavatory, Trailways Bus Station. Where at last the demon has been released. For it is the New Year. The shifting of the Earth’s axis. For to be away from what is familiar, like walking on a sharp-slanted floor, allows
something other
in. Or the
something other
has been inside you all along and until now you do not know.

In his right eyeball a speck of dirt? dust? blood?

Scared, he knows right away. Knows even before he sees: sign of Satan. In the yellowish-white of his eyeball. Not the coiled little snake but the five-sided star:
pentagram
.

He knows, he’s been warned. Five-sided star:
pentagram
.

It’s there, in his eye. Tries to rub it out with his fist.

Backs away terrified and gagging and he’s running out of the fluorescent-bright lavatory and through the bus station where eyes trail after him curious, bemused, pitying, annoyed. He’s a familiar sight here though no one knows his name. Runs home, about three miles. His mother knows there’s trouble, has he lied about taking his medicine? hiding the pill under his tongue? Yes but God knows you can’t oversee every minute with one like him. Yes but your love wears thin like the lead backing of a cheap mirror corroding the glass. Yes but you have prayed, you have prayed and prayed and cursed the words echoing not upward to God but downward as in an empty well.

Twenty-six years old, shaved head glinting blue. Luminous shining eyes women in the street call beautiful. In the neighborhood he’s known by his first name. Sweet guy but strange, excitable. A habit of twitching his shoulders like he’s shrugging free of somebody’s grip.

Fast as you run somebody runs faster!

In the house that’s a semi-detached rowhouse on Mill Street he’s not listening to his angry mother asking why is he home so early, has a job in a building supply yard so why isn’t he there? Pushes past the old woman and into the bathroom, shuts the door and there in the mirror oh God it’s there: the five-sided star,
pentagram
. Sign of Satan. Embedded deep in his right eyeball, just below the dilated iris.

No! No! God help!

Goes wild, rubs with both fists, pokes with fingers. He’s weeping, shouting. Beats at himself, fists and nails. His sister now pounding on the door what is it? what’s wrong? and Mama’s voice loud and frightened. It’s
happened
, he thinks. His first clear thought.
Happened
. Like a stone sinking so calm. Because hasn’t he always known the prayers did no good, on your knees bowing your head inviting Jesus into your heart does no good. The sign of the demon would return, absorbed into his blood but must one day re-emerge.

Pushes past the women and in the kitchen paws through the drawer scattering cutlery that falls to the floor, bounces and clatters and there’s the big carving knife in his hand, his hand shuts about it like fate. Pushes past the women now in reverse where they’ve followed him into the kitchen, knocks his one-hundred-eighty-pound older sister aside with his elbow as lightly as he lifts bags of gravel, armloads of bricks. Hasn’t he prayed Our Father to be a machine many times. A machine does not feel, a machine does not think. A machine does not hurt. A machine does not starve for love. A machine does not starve for what it does not know to name: salvation.

Back then inside the bathroom, slamming the door against the screaming women, and locking it. Gibbering to himself,
Away Satan! Away Satan! God help!
With a hand strangely steely as if practiced wielding the point of the knife, boldly inserting and twisting into the accursed eyeball. And no pain – only a burning cleansing roaring sensation as of a blast of fire. Out pops the eyeball, and out the sign of Satan. But connected by tissue, nerves. It’s elastic so he’s pulling, fingers now slippery-excited with blood. He’s sawing with the sharp blade of the steak knife. Cuts the eyeball free, like Mama squeezing baby out of her belly into this pig trough of sin and filth, and no turning back till Jesus calls you home.

He drops the eyeball into the toilet, flushes the toilet fast.

Before Satan can intervene.

One of those antiquated toilets where water swirls about the stained bowl, wheezes and yammers to itself, sighs, grumbles, finally swallows like it’s doing you a favor. And the sign of the demon is gone.

One eye socket empty and fresh-bleeding he’s on his knees praying Thank you
God! thank you God!
weeping as angels in radiant garments with faces of blinding brightness reach down to embrace him not minding his red-slippery mask of a face. Now he’s one of them himself, now he will float into the sky where, some wind-blustery January morning, you’ll see him, or a face like his, in a furious cloud.

Alabaster

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Caitlín Kiernan created the character of Dancy Flammarion for her second novel,
Threshold
(1998). She also wrote several short stories about Dancy, of which this is one. Dark Horse comics recently began a series of comics featuring the albino girl who wanders the South killing monsters that only she can see. Dancy believes herself to be guided by an angel. Ascertaining the veracity of someone experiencing angelophany – angelic manifestation to a human through one or more of the five senses – is difficult. In ancient Judeo-Christian belief, angelophanies were often extraordinary visionary experiences involving brilliant light, fire, lightning, thunder and even earthquakes. Sometimes angels appeared as fellow humans and were not immediately recognized as heavenly beings. Like Dancy’s, these angelophanies were usually personal and rarely witnessed by others.

The albino girl, whose name is Dancy Flammarion, has walked a long way since the fire in Bainbridge five nights ago. It rained all morning long, and the blue-gray clouds are still hanging sullen and low above the pines, obscuring the wide south Georgia sky. But she’s grateful for the clouds, for anything that hides her from the blistering June sun. She’s already thanked both St George and St Anthony the Abbott for sending her the clouds, because her grandmother taught her they were the patron saints of people suffering from skin diseases. Her grandmother taught her lots of things. The damp air smells like pine straw and the fat white toadstools growing along the side of the highway. Dancy knows not to eat those, not ever, no matter how hungry she gets. Her grandmother taught her about toadstools, too.

She stops, shifting the weight of her heavy old duffel bag from one shoulder to the other, the duffel bag and the black umbrella tied to it with hemp twine, and looks back the way she’s just come. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the voices she hears are only inside her head or if they’re coming from somewhere else. The highway glistens dark and wet and rough, like a cottonmouth moccasin that’s just crawled out of the water. But there’s no one and nothing back there that she can see, no one who might have spoken her name, so Dancy turns around and starts walking again.

It’s what you
don’t
see that’s almost always the worst,
her grandmother told her once.
It’s what you don’t see will drag you down one day, if you ain’t careful.

Dancy glances over her shoulder, and the angel is standing in the center of the highway, straddling the broken yellow dividing line. Its tattered muslin and silk robes are even blacker than the wet asphalt, and they flutter and flap in a fierce and holy wind that touches nothing else. The angel’s four ebony wings are spread wide, and it holds a burning sword high above its four shimmering kaleidoscope faces, both skeletal hands gripped tightly around the weapon’s silver hilt.

“I was starting to think maybe I’d lost you,” Dancy says and turns to face the angel. She can hear the wind that swirls always about it, like hearing a freight train when you’re only half way across a trestle and there’s no way to get off the tracks before it catches up with you, nowhere to go unless you want to fall, and that sound drowns out or silences the noises coming from the woods at the edge of the road.

And there’s another sound, too, a rumble like thunder, but she knows that it isn’t thunder.

“If I went any slower,” she replies, “I’d just about be standing still.”

The thunder sound again, and the roar of the angel’s scalding wind, and Dancy squints into the blinding light that’s begun to leak from its eight sapphire eyes.

“No, angel,” she says quietly. “I ain’t forgot about you. I ain’t forgotten about any of it.”

The angel shrieks and swings its burning sword in a long, slow arc, leaving behind bits of fire and ember, ash and cinders, and now the air smells more like burning pitch and charred flesh than it smells like pine trees and summer rain and poisonous toadstools.

“Oh, I think you can probably keep up,” she says, and turns her back on the Seraph.

And then there’s only the dead, violated emptiness and the terrible silence that the angel always leaves behind when it goes. Very slowly, by hesitant degrees, all the murmuring forest noises return, and Dancy walks just a little faster than before; she’s relieved when the high pines finally fall away on either side of the road and the land opens up, changing once more to farms and wild prairie. Pastures and cows, barbed-wire fences and a small service station maybe a hundred yards or so further down the highway, and Dancy wishes she had the money for a Coke. A Coke would be good, syrupy sweet and ice cold and bubbling on her tongue. But at least they won’t charge her to use the toilet, and she can wash up a little and piss without having to worry about squatting in poison oak.

She doesn’t look back at the woods again, the trees standing straight and tall on either side of the highway. That part of her life is over, lived and past and done with, one small stretch of road she only needed to walk once, and, besides, she knows the angel won’t come to her again for days.

After the rain and the Seraph’s whirlwind, the afternoon is still and cool, and her boots seem very loud on the wet pavement. It only takes her a few more minutes to reach the service station, where an old man is sitting on a plastic milk crate beneath a corrugated tin awning. He waves to her, and Dancy waves back at him, then she tugs at the green canvas strap on her duffel bag because her shoulder’s gone to sleep again.

There’s a big plywood billboard beside the road, but it’s not nearly so tall as the faded Texaco sign – that round placard dangling from a lamppost, a perfect black circle to contain its five-pointed red pentacle, that witch’s symbol to keep out some great evil. Dancy already knows all about pentagrams, so she turns her attention to the billboard instead; it reads live panther-deadly maneater in sloppy whitewash lettering.

She leaves the highway, skirting the edges of a wide orange-brown mud hole where the Texaco’s parking lot and driveway begins, crunching across the white-gray limestone gravel strewn around the gasoline pumps. The old man is standing up now, digging about in a pocket of his overalls.

“How ya doin’ there, sport?” he asks her, and his hand reappears with half a roll of wintergreen Certs.

“I’m fine,” she says, not smiling because her shoulder hurts too much. “You got a bathroom I can use?”

“You gonna buy somethin’?” he asks and pops one of the Certs into his mouth. His teeth are stained yellow-brown, like turtle bones that have been lying for years at the bottom of a cypress spring.

“I don’t have any money,” she tells him.

“Hell,” he says and sits back down on the plastic milk crate. “Well, I don’t guess that makes no difference. The privy’s right inside. But you better damn flush when you’re done, you hear me? And don’t you get piss on the seat.”

Dancy nods her head, then stares at him until the old man leans back and blinks at her.

“You want somethin’ else?”

“Do you really have a live panther?” she asks him, and the man arches both his eyebrows and grins, showing off his yellow-brown, tobacco-stained smile again.

“That’s what the sign says, ain’t it? Or cain’t you read?”

“I can read,” Dancy Flammarion replies and looks down at the toes of her boots. “I wouldn’t have known to ask if I couldn’t read.”

“Then why’d you ask such a fool question for? You think I’m gonna put up a big ol’ sign sayin’ I got a live panther if I ain’t?”

“Does it cost money to see it?”

“You better believe it does. I’ll let you use the jake free of charge, ’cause it wouldn’t be Christian to do otherwise, but a gander at that cat’s gonna set you back three bucks, cold, hard cash.”

“I don’t have three dollars.”

“Then I guess you ain’t gonna be seein’ my panther,” the old man says, and he grins and offers her a Certs. She takes the candy from him and sets her duffel bag down on the gravel between them.

“How’d you get him?”

The old man rubs at the coarse salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and slips what’s left of the roll of Certs into the bib pocket of his overalls.

“You some kind of runaway or somethin’? You got people out lookin’ for you, sport? You a druggie?”

“Is he in a cage?” she asks, matching his questions with a question of her own.

“He’s a she,” the old man grunts. “’Course she’s in a cage. What you
think
someone’s gonna do with a panther? Keep it in a damned burlap sack?”

“No,” she says. “How’d you say you caught him?”

“I didn’t.”

“Did someone else catch him for you?”

“It
ain’t
no him. It’s a
she
.”

Dancy looks up at the old man and rolls the quickly shrinking piece of candy from one side of her mouth to the other and back again.

“You’re some kinda albino, ain’t you,” the old man says, and he leans a little closer. He smells like sweat and Beech-Nut chewing tobacco, old cars and fried food.

“Yeah,” she says and nods her head.

“Yep. I thought so. I used to have some rabbits had eyes like yours.”