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Angel in Devil's Boots
"I'm an Angel in Devil's boots..." It was dark in here, mostly; a soothing expanse of darkness with about half a dozen oases of light scattered along the east wall. The ceiling was barely two metres high and the room less than twenty paces wide but it stretched off into infinity and the further recesses were only visible when one of the fire-eaters wandered down there and spat alcohol past their flaming torches. The atmosphere was hot, muggy, somewhat lacking in oxygen; poorly ventilated, too, so that after a few bursts from the fog machine, you could hardly see more than a few metres around you even without the added effect of the darkness. The flares of light around the flame-throwers were oddly coloured. Loud music was playing. Something thrash-industrial, heavy on the bass. If I'd been at the controls I would have fiddled with the equaliser so that it would sound more like music and less like someone with a microphone shoved down their throat being beaten up by Christians. Whatever. The clientele preferred it this way. Glancing around I observed that the majority had assumed normal forms; the days of the horned, red-skinned thing with barbed tail and cloven hooves were long gone. We retained the horns, though, simply as a way of telling us apart from the others; lost humans, poor wandering bastards who'd been duped by whatever variant of Christianity was most prevalent where they'd lived. They thought they'd died and gone to hell; they were half right. Sometimes you'd see a Thing, a manifestation of twisted consciousness given solid form; something from the Outside that had gotten In. They didn't last very long but while they did everyone gave them a wide berth. I saw a human accidentally stumble into one of them. It surrounded him like a swarm of insects. There was a brief commotion while it consumed him before vanishing. No-one mopped up the stains. I sensed her long before she entered; a breath of fresh air in the heat, a pale glow in the darkness. She stood at the foot of the stairs leading up and out, huge white dove's wings folded back nervously, she glancing about hesitantly, not sure why she was here. I caught her attention and beckoned her over to my table, gestured that she should sit. She came over and stood behind the chair, hands resting on its back. She glanced down at the puddle of spilled beer between us. "Long way from home," I commented, not trying to put her at ease, just casting about for something to say, hoping to get her talking, to break the tedium. "Ah, yes... it's... I mean, things have changed up there..." I snorted, laughed into my beer. "You've only just noticed? He faded away thousands of years ago. What have you been doing in the meantime, house-cleaning?" She blushed. "I was on Earth. Doing good works. Something you probably wouldn't understand." Well, she was right about that. "Do you want me to give you the `good is relative" speech, then? Or would you like a drink?" Even in this light, I could see her blush. "Aw, come on! He's gone. You won't be committing a sin. If you want to get technical, it isn't even alcohol; it's the concept of alcohol." "We're only concepts, ourselves. So that makes it just the same." "You lot are still bent out of shape by the whole `free will" thing, aren't you? So I chose to drink until I lose consciousness and collapse in a pile of my own puke. So what? No-one's harmed by it, except me. And, as you pointed out, we only have conceptual existence. I could drown myself in the blood of innocents and –" I could see that this wasn't the right argument. "Look, would you accept a drink of ice water?" Down here, that was always a good choice. She hesitantly smiled and sat down across the table from me. In the space between two loud parts of the song, I snapped my fingers twice; a simpering thing lurched over and moaned something. I pointed at her and made a rocking gesture with one hand, thumb and little finger extended; it giggled and bounded away towards the bar. It would be back in a few minutes with a carafe of iced water and a bottle of… something, for me. I had no idea what it was the bar was giving us; it was alcoholic, tasted foul and was never the same thing twice. It was all conceptual, anyway, so I suppose it didn't matter. Although I did send that dark greenish-brown variety back. It'd had worms swimming in it. That was just gratuitous. I turned back to her and smiled. "Well. My name is Joshua, demon of the Dominion of Margulan under the Overlordship of Ushuk, Host Aggredion, Sixth Circle." "Oh," she said, still nervous. "Is that the one with the, uh, suicides?" I shrugged. "I never saw any while I was growing up there. It's just another part of hell. There's no-one there any more, though. They all left. Humans too." "Where did they all go? There were rather a lot of them." "And more comin' everyday. Where'd they go? They stormed Heaven and found it empty. Some stayed there and got lost. It's a big place, after all. You probably didn't notice them, being Earthbound and all that. After they discovered that Heaven had a physical existence they sought out other conceptual spaces. Asgard. The Void. The Summerland. Yffarn. Jeldred. The Duad and beyond. And, of course, your favourite afterlife, and mine – hell. They don't tend to hang around here very long for some reason." The sound system was now playing something a little less ear-shattering, still sounding like it was being mixed through a sewerage system. Nice, twinkly twentieth century pop music. I couldn't make any sense of the lyrics; some madwoman singing. Eeohxzeuste, incorhorde, ohehclode, stanyomiede, pahraideede, ilyodinde, lihfiterchde, dadhyoniede... The drinks arrived. She sipped hers delicately, allowing the smallest possible amount of tainted physical matter to pass her ethereal lips. "Did the humans ever find these other places?" I pulled the cork out of the bottle with my teeth, spat it off into the darkness (where something rat-like grabbed it and ran) and swigged a fourth of it down in one go. Bright blue liquid, emitting a glow bright enough to read by. A glow bright enough to be seen from the other tables. If any of my brothers were here, they'd see me talking to her. "They found them. And others. They never found anyone in any of them. No ultimate responsibility, no great Architect. No-one to blame for it all. What's your name?" I finished casually. "Ysielle," she blurted, obviously without meaning to. "Uh... my name's Ysielle. It was originally more Hebraic, but I always thought it was too elevated a name for a mere angel. I thought those really old-testament names should be reserved for actual aspects of the Deity." I grinned. A mere angel, huh? "And so you corrupted the very name that He gave you? You believed you knew better and chose another name over your rightful one? Doesn't that sound a little close to pride?" Ysielle started back, her glass almost spilling. "You don't understand. You don't know what it was like. You don't." She was on the verge of tears, not over what I'd said but from some deep, internal pain which my words had evoked. I reached out and gently took her hand, earnest and sincerely sympathetic look on the outside of my eyes, but up against the inside of my eyeballs I was already projecting a movie of the things I could do to her. Instead of breaking down and crying, Ysielle let a few stray tears track down her cheeks and then leaned closer to me. "You've got this funny blue-coloured light flickering in your eyes." I blinked and shook my head, rescheduling the films for later. "I'm sorry," and after a suitably solemn pause, "Tell me what it was like." I held out the bottle of liquid blue fire. She stared off into space for a few moments then reached out blindly, grabbed the neck of the bottle and finished the whole thing in a series of painfully heroic gulps. If she was doing this to impress me, it was working. She gasped for breath and slammed the bottle down on the table, breaking it. Nasty sharp slivers of glass flew in all directions, one of them embedding itself in the palm of her hand. She dropped the bottle neck and stared at her hand, blue glow dripping from one corner of her mouth. Absently, she wiped her lips with her sleeve, the liquor seeping into the glowing weave of the material and adding a faint blue tinge to its customary white suffusion. With careful deliberation she tugged the glass fragment from her hand. Where it had been was a glowing red beacon of light about the size of a coal at the end of a cigarette. Angel's blood. I glanced at her face. Was she such a newbie that she didn't know that the taste of Angel's blood was, to a demon, the most pleasurable thing possible? Better, even, some had said, than His presence. After all, the angels were part of Him; His essence flowed in their veins. A lot of Angels had disappeared after first venturing into hell. Things had stabilised after it was discovered that it worked the other way around; Angels could drink Demon's blood. It sent them into wild raptures of destruction, screaming from the sky with bolts of black-edged lightning streaming from their eyes. The Angels who had so corrupted themselves this realised, when the rages had passed, that they could never return to Heaven. Rather than arrange their own Fall and join us in hell, they exiled themselves to Limbo – calling themselves The Low Grigori – and spent their time hovering within the grey fogs and moaning sadly. Drama queens. She held up her hand, the brilliant red starting to drip down the outside edge of her palm. It glowed brighter than the blue liquor had. If any dropped on the table, I might not be able to restrain myself. I'd leap up and lick the table clean. Then I'd grab her hand and suck on it as hard as I could. She looked at me sitting perfectly still then she pressed her injury against the sleeve of her gown. The red fire diffused into the material, giving it a subtle pink glow. I thought briefly about eating the entire gown and then grinned at the thought of where that would probably lead. Ysielle swayed in her seat. The concept of alcohol had just hit the concept of her brain. If I hadn't still been holding her hand, she would have fallen out of the seat and sprawled in the trash. Empty bottles, cigarette ash by the ton, used condoms, syringes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine videotapes, broken glass, dried blood (but not Angel or Demon), bones from feasts held thousands of years ago, the inevitable lost billiard balls, broken cutlery, the bodies of rodents dead from over-eating, minute fragments of AOL install CDs, broken South Park toys, stray fingers, items of junk jewellery, lost socks, underwear and many dead batteries from worn-out vibrators. To imagine what colour her gown would be after being stained with that, all I had to do was look around me. "Hey, things!" she shouted suddenly. "Bring us another bottle of that blue stuff." I blinked and held up two fingers. "And straws," she added. "I would have thought that the corruption and downfall of one of the hosts of Heaven..." she smiled at this, "well, that it would've taken longer. I must say you learn quickly." Her smile grew to a grin, a spliff the size of a shuttlecock gripped between her perfectly white teeth. I continued, "so what are you doing down here, anyway? Not that it's any of my business. Unless you'd rather talk about the unbearable dread you felt when you realised that He was no longer among you and that all your lives were, as ours are, a charade." Whoops, there was my Demonic nice-guy persona showing through again. I took a few more gulps of glowing blue and wondered what she was really down here for. I meant really really, not just whatever lie she was about to feed me. Yeah, she'd do that. Angels lie all the time, to themselves, mostly. She gave me what she probably considered to be a look of bleak, careless fuck-me-and-marry-me-young kind of disdain. To me it looked like a kitten that had a spot of milk on its nose and was going cross-eyed trying to see it. "I guess I'm just dumb. It took me this long to realise that He wasn't coming back. It doesn't matter what we do, now. I could have stayed up there with a broom keeping the dust of the ages out of the Mansion." Here, her voice faltered. "It's just... that... " With rare perception, I saw it. "It must've been pretty lonely up there." She leaned back, sucked smoke from the spliff, then spat the thimble-sized soggy end into the darkness. Exhaling smoke through her teeth, she downed a fifth of her bottle and snarled "Put it back in your pants, you asshole." She tossed down a card and added, "Go fish." "You know why I'm here," she casually added some time later, in the back room. "I had some ideas," I countered. "I didn't think it polite to speak out until I was sure. For all I knew you might have been down here looking for the toilets." She burst out laughing at this, a halo of blue smoke forming around her head, the mouthpiece of the hookah still clenched in her teeth. I inhaled until I felt the storm-clouds settling inside, then held it a little longer and exhaled through my nostrils. I sat back and stared up into the darkness overhead. If I looked hard enough I could see the course black netting that had been painted against the ceiling, thumbtacks still there from some long-ago celebration. Four more thumbtacks in a rectangle on the wall, one of them supporting a torn triangular scrap of paper almost gone to shreds of dust. Wow, was I stoned. "Uh. So why are we here? I've forgotten." She looked like she very much wanted to collapse into giggles over this, but a last trace of seriousness saved her. "Here. I brought these with me." She held up two large plastic-bag-sealed syringes. I took one and tore it open. A needle, safely capped with translucent plastic, dropped amidst the general trash on the coffee-table. I retrieved it while managing to keep the tremors of anticipation out of my hands, tore the packet open and fitted the needle to the end. I sorted through the junk until I found a length of rubber hose (someone had been planning to add another hose to the hookah) and an old school tie of some sort, dark purple with knife-thin diagonal crimson stripes. I gave her the rubber hose. I'd done this twice before. Each time I thought I'd sunk as low as any of us ever got, and here I was corrupting a newly fallen one, instructing her in the use of our infamies, as it were. I'm sure she'd seen something like this while on Earth – she wasn't entirely innocent – but actually doing it herself was entirely another thing. I sat there and watched as she drew her sleeve up, bunching it around her shoulder, and then wrapping the rubber hose around her upper arm. Black hose contrasting starkly with white flesh. Gripping the ends in her teeth, the fabric of her gown lit her face like a centrefold. She clenched and unclenched her fingers until an almost imperceptible ridge formed on the inside of her elbow, then she slid the needle in with the accomplished ease of a junkie and spat the hose out. With no expression on her face she slowly drew the plunger out, allowing the radiant red essence in to the syringe. It was the holy spirit, glowing like fire; if not the actual blood of Christ which had made holy the Grail, then something just as good. I could feel its warmth from where I sat. I wrapped the tie around my arm, patted until I found a vein and then slowly, sensually, pressed the angled needle point against the vein, dimpled the surface and then slid in. I worked the plunger with my thumb and extracted a slim cylinder of blue-purple-black Demon's blood, radiating a sense of cool, aloof solitude, the essence of those who had been denied His presence for so long. I pulled the needle out and the hole healed instantly. I held the syringe out to Ysielle just as she held hers out for me. For a brief moment we saw each other by the glow of her blood; it gave an oddly depraved look to the whole thing, like we were two abuse-ravaged drug fiends conspiring in an opium den.. Our fingers touched. The syringes changed hands. The vein in my arm was still up; I jabbed the needle in and forced the Angel's blood into me. I could feel it even before it had travelled down the needle. It was warmth, the warmth of a gentle afternoon asleep in the sun on a soft blanket, of waking up next to someone you love, someone you know will be there tomorrow morning. The essence of those who had basked in the love of the Creator, of everything we'd been denied since the Fall. I rolled over onto my side and drew my legs up, burying my head amongst the cushions, eyes squeezed shut. If I pretended, I could almost deceive myself that it had never happened, that we'd never been sent out into the cold and that it had all been a mistake and we could all go home now. I was home. I wanted to share this with Ysielle. When I opened my eyes and looked up, she was sitting back in a tattered old armchair, hands steepled before her, eyes glittering over her interlaced fingers. "Are you okay?" I asked in a childishly self-contented voice. Her eyes narrowed. Her lips smiled. "I'm fine." Son of the Morning, I'd forgotten how hard this stuff hits me. "Please, come here. You look like you need a hug." Actually, that looked like the last thing she needed. But I needed one, and I knew she wouldn't mind. Awkwardly, she got up and sat down on the couch at my head. I became uncomfortably aware of the heat being given off by her thigh. Cautiously, I rested my head on it. I felt her fingers in my hair. She slid closer, forcing me to sit up. I went to put my arms around her and she grabbed the lapels of my ratty old black denim jacket, dragged me up to meet her and she kissed me. Just as the initial rush of warmth was fading, she renewed it. Quickly I found out what kind of a rush she was getting from this. She dragged me further up the couch and then tore open my jeans, reaching up with one toe to lever the pants down around my ankles. She hoisted the hem of her gown up around her thighs and climbed astride me. I could feel that terrible Angelic strength as she tore at my clothing. No penetration occurred; I was in no state to get an erection and she didn't seem to care. She didn't need me inside her, anyway; she already had that. She just needed someone to hang on to while it had its effect. She squeezed my ribs with her knees, threw her head back and screamed. It wasn't the sort of shrill operatic cry you'd expect from someone who sang hosannas for a living; it was a full-throated shriek of outrage. She was feeling what it had been like, being thrown out of Heaven. And the years of being outcast that had followed. On top of this was the knowledge that she was as alone as we were. They were able to deceive themselves only for so long. Eventually, they all found their way down here. Except Michael. He would never leave. He stood at the left-hand side of the Throne in an otherwise empty Heaven, looking towards the gate, and ever would be. Ysielle's body was shuddering violently, her crotch rubbing against my hip, her fingers tearing holes in my jacket. One hand freed itself only to lash out blindly and gouge a fist-sized hole in the wall, in the stone that lay behind it. Presently she calmed down and let me go. I saw her expression, the one where they haven't quite decided if they're going to get up and go their merry way or drag me closer and tear my throat out and drink from the source. I'd seen it twice before. Few things scared me like this. Just as the others had, she spared me. Perhaps one day, one of them would give in to that impulse. What would happen to me? Would I vanish from this world? She was still giving me that look, but enough time had passed to tell me that she wouldn't do it. She slid down against the back of the couch, threading her legs underneath mine as I turned to lie on my back. I could still feel her warmth. With a sinuous motion that I wouldn't have been able to manage before I'd shot her up, I shoved my legs around and sat next to her. I even dared put my arm around her shoulders. Whatever influence she'd absorbed from me was now a part of her, irretrievably so. I wondered what would happen if these exchanges continued; eventually, all the Angels would be half Demon, and we, half Angel. Perhaps then we'd all go to Limbo to hang out with the Low Grigori. I knew that I felt different. Each time I did this, the urge to do it again grew stronger. The only reason I was still here was that hell was considerably smaller than Heaven, and we stood a better chance of running into each other. I hoped that Ysielle would go out and spread the word. I hoped that mingling their compassion with our righteous anger would serve us. For a while we sat as close to each other as we could, fingers intertwined tightly. Eventually she said that she had to go. She stood in the doorway, her gown still radiant, her skin flawless. Then I noticed her bare feet. "Listen, that floor can be dangerous." I levered off my boots – my terminally-scuffed-and-cracked-been-to-hell-and-back docs – and tossed them to her. She smiled and slipped them on, not bothering to lace them. She turned, twirling her gown out with a flourish, and vanished into the foggy dark. |
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