All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (43 page)

I blundered down
the dark corridor, seething and sad. After a while, light began to
filter down from ahead of me. I quickened my pace, desperate to get
out before my other emotions waned and the sickening feel of
claustrophobia enveloped me, constricting my chest and wrenching my
stomach inside out.

The light grew and
I saw the tunnel ahead clearly, so I pushed myself to go faster. I
filled my lungs with air likely no different than what I’d
been breathing, but that tasted so much fresher. It revitalized me,
gave my limbs new energy. I rounded a bend and saw the exit, the
source of the light shining through the portal. I stepped through.

I
collected comic books in my teens—one of the few normalities
in which I engaged between street life and drug use. Neil Gaiman
wrote some of my favorites: Sandman, The Books of Magic, and
Death—now eerily appropriate reading. One of my favorite lines
came from a Sandman story and went something like this: S
ometimes
you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you, and sometimes when you
fall, you fly.

As I plunged
through the doorway and over the precipice of whatever drop I didn’t
know lay before me, I crazily wondered which would be the case this
time.

Given my name, I
didn’t feel good about my chances.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

Poe pushed by
Icarus, diverting her eyes from the stunned expression on his face.
Her cheeks went hot, like she’d been caught watching a Paul
Newman movie with her hand down her pants. The urge to stop and
explain that if she had a choice, she’d never have taken any
souls, least of all his mother, coursed through her, but the forward
movement of her feet couldn’t be slowed.

She burst across
the plane of the doorway with Sister Agnes’ soul in tow, but
didn’t find the nun’s living room as she should have.
Instead, she entered a hazy, indistinct place, like she saw it
through a heavily frosted pane of glass.

Poe took a step
forward and her toe contacted something solid. She looked down, but
her leg below the knee was as disguised by whiteness as the area
around her, like she looked at it in a misted-over mirror. After a
second, the haze cleared revealing the bottom of her leg, her foot,
the stone she’d kicked sitting on brown, loamy soil. The blur
around her foot disappeared as though sucked up by a cosmic vacuum
cleaner. When she raised her head, she saw her surroundings clearly:
Arbutus trees with their peeling bark and red, slick-looking wood
beneath; the broad leaves of oak and maple; the black-shingled roof
of a house showing through the branches. She turned slowly, hoping
she wouldn’t see what she knew would be there: the shack.

It was.

“
Oh
no.”

She spun
one-hundred and eighty degrees, not sure why: to avoid the rundown
shack, to run, to find Icarus and beg his forgiveness and help,
maybe to explain to the nun’s spirit what happened. But the
nun was gone, the door to the bedroom was gone, Icarus was gone. The
path back to the old neighborhood snaked through the trees behind
her and somewhere up the path she heard two voices talking as they
came closer.

Poe’s mouth
went dry. She knew who the voices belonged to, knew Aaron Baxter and
his cousin would soon come swaggering into the small clearing, then
take her into the shed to rape her and lose their lives for it.

Not again.
Please, not again.

She deviated off
the path and willed her feet to take her toward the shed; it
surprised her to find they obeyed this time. Her pace increased,
carrying her across the short distance to the crooked door as the
boys’ voices came closer. She slid through the doorway and
eased it closed behind her so as not to attract the boys’
attention. Crouching behind the rickety door, Poe peeked through the
crack between it and the door jamb.

The two boys
reached the edge of the clearing and stopped, sly smiles crossing
their faces. Aaron Baxter elbowed his cousin in the ribs and
pointed. Poe’s gaze followed his finger to the younger girl
standing in the middle of the clearing staring directly at the door
through which she peered. The slightly open door mesmerized
twelve-year-old Paula Edgar so she didn’t notice the boys
creeping toward her.

I thought there
was something in the shack. Someone...me.

The boys reached
the girl and Aaron spoke, startling Paula and making her jump. She
turned to engage them in conversation and Poe stood, backed away
from the door. Hell already forced her to endure that awful day
again, now it appeared she would have to relive it once more, this
time as an observer, which might be worse.

Poe spun away from
the door with its crack which would have shown her Aaron and his
cousin coaxing Paula toward the shack. Though she knew the shed was
empty, the guardian angel wanted to find somewhere to hide, or at
least hide her eyes until the terrible event concluded, but she knew
she wouldn’t find anywhere to conceal herself. At least she
thought she wouldn’t until she found she was no longer in the
shack.

The brightly lit
room was opulently—if weirdly—decorated. Tapestries hung
on the walls; a huge desk supported by thick wooden legs carved into
the shapes of gargoyles with lolling tongues dominated one side of
the room. She glanced back over her shoulder and found the cracked
shed door by a wall covered with another tapestry. The scene on the
hanging showed a copse of trees sewn with brown trunks and green
leaves, a clearing, three small figures and a gray shack leaning to
one side. The three embroidered people moved across the clearing
toward the shed.

Poe closed her eyes
and jerked away from the tapestry, returning her attention to the
room. When she opened her eyes, she noticed a chair set close to the
desk. Over-sized and made of wood, the chair looked as though it may
have been carved out of a single piece, like a huge stump ripped
from the ground and chiseled into a seat, back and four legs. A man
sat in the chair, his feet on the seat, knees drawn up to his chest.
Poe took a cautious step forward, eyes fixed on him. His shaggy hair
hung down past his shoulders and his frame was slight. She realized,
even without seeing his face, this wasn’t a man but a boy, a
teen. Her breath caught in her throat as she thought it must be
Aaron Baxter or his cousin.

She took another
step. On a table beside the teen, a skeleton lizard scuttled across
the bottom of its wooden cage and clacked its bony jaws at her. The
teen’s head inclined slightly toward the cage, but then
returned to the same position, staring at the tapestry on the wall
in front of him. Poe followed his gaze but the tapestry was a blank
sea of black velvet.

She approached the
large chair; the boy still didn’t notice her. She leaned
forward, attempting to see his face, but his hair hung down by his
cheek, hiding his features. She lifted her hand, reaching for his
shoulder to get his attention, but stopped.

What if it is
Aaron? What if it’s his cousin?

She shivered. She’d
never found out the name of the other boy who raped her, the young
man she killed. Not knowing what to call him made it all the worse.
Poe drew a halting breath and forced her hand to complete its
journey.

Her fingers touched
the young man’s shoulder; he didn’t react so she
squeezed, lightly at first, then more firmly when he didn’t
acknowledge her presence. Finally, when she felt she must be
gripping hard enough to cause pain, the teen faced her, their gazes
met and she looked into the unmistakable eyes of the boy’s
father. It seemed like an eternity since the two of them traveled to
Hell together, since she’d lost him at the edge of Abaddon’s
pit. Poe swallowed hard.

“
Trevor?”

The teen stared
back at her without recognition, eyes glassy and unfocused. Poe
threw her arms around his neck and pulled him to her.

“
Trevor.
Thank God.”

Trevor didn’t
respond.

†‡†

Wind
rushed by, flapping my hair against my forehead and temples. At
first, I fell beside a cliff of orange, chalk-like stone, but it
disappeared leaving empty air on all sides. I plummeted blind—back
toward the ground—past strange creatures floating or flying
through the air, some of them gargoyles on ragged wings, others
wisps of smoke shaped like people full of holes. A fish, a turtle,
misshapen birds, a clown with smeared make-up and pointed teeth. The
only thing missing was the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from the movie
Ghostbusters.
Although
I fell at an incredible speed, I saw each of the creatures clearly,
saw every detail of their hideous faces and twisted bodies.

Eventually,
the creatures disappeared. I braced myself for impact presuming I
must be approaching the ground, but instead of hitting earth, a
movie began to play around me as though I fell through the screen of
an over-sized IMAX theater
.
The
movie at this particular theater showed the story of my life.

I stifled a yawn.

Of course, I’d
lived all this crap—the abuse at the hands of Father Dominic,
the time on the street, the booze, the drugs, my sham of a
marriage—but I also saw the first cut when those bastard
muggers slid a knife into me in the churchyard a few months back. My
life in syndication.

You’d think
Hell would have more original tricks up its sleeve.

As I fell and
watched, I noticed differences in the familiar scenes playing around
me. The same happenings as before—same unlikely plot line,
same unbelievable events, same hammy actors. The thing which
differed from when I saw it last and from when I lived it hid in the
background.

Standing off to the
side, or in the shadows, or hidden behind a curtain in every event
was Michael or Azrael, sometimes both.

The revelation
startled me. If I could have sat up to take a closer look, I would
have, but the act of lying on one’s back and falling precludes
the possibility of straining into a seated position. Or maybe I
needed to do a few more crunches if I ever saw a gym again.

As I took stock of
what seeing them meant, the movie ended with my murder and it seemed
to me the faces beneath those hoods pulled up to block out the rain
belonged to the two archangels.

And then I was no
longer falling.

I didn’t hit
the ground with a bone-jarring jolt, I simply stopped. With no
warning, my feet touched solid ground. More precisely, my feet
settled on a scattering of dirty straw close to what looked like a
large pile of shit which would have required a huge bowel. The
thought of how big the beast which made the heap of feces must have
been made me shudder as much as the smell of it did.

I glanced away from
the mountainous turd at my surroundings. It was night and I stood in
a lane created by a network of drab canvas tents pitched in rows on
either side of me. Frayed ropes ran from their edges to wooden
stakes driven into the ground. I took a few steps away from the
mound of fecal matter leaving its smell behind and caught a whiff of
the old canvas instead. Evidently the tents had been put away wet a
few times.

Stepping over the
lines anchoring tents to ground, I picked my way along the makeshift
boulevard feeling like a youngster who sneaked into the carnival. I
heard no sounds beyond the occasional snap of a corner of canvas
picked up by a wind I didn’t feel. No carnival music emanating
from a Ray Bradbury-esque carousel, no pitchman barking about
freaks, no screams of pain or pleasure.

Light shone between
the tents, casting shadowy spider webs on the ground as it played
over the cat’s cradle of ropes, but the light prevented me
seeing beyond the far edge of the tent. I pressed on, sometimes
remembering to draw breath, always expecting some Hell-thing to jump
out at me—something capable of leaving behind a bowel movement
the size of a Volkswagen.