HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (17 page)

He put one hand on
his heart, closed his eyes, and wondered if he could feel that heart
breaking. Because that is what it was doing, now, this moment,
breaking in two, half of it dying with his Mary. He felt it as an
intimate pain so real and so deep that he thought he would have to
lie down and close his eyes, just like his beloved, lie down beside
her and wish for his own darkness.

When morning dawned,
he rose from beside her and covered his love's calm face with the
sheet. He made funeral arrangements. He took the streetcar for the
last time away from her house. He couldn’t go back to the
mansion where Angelique waited. She would read his face and know of
his tragedy. He couldn’t stand to see her gloat or have her
tell him she had warned him about this sad end. She would remind him
of what a fool he had been to get involved in the first place. She
would remind him they really had no business on this planet,
cavorting with God's favorite beings.

He went to a city
park and sat on a bench in the shade of great oaks. He watched
squirrels argue, people walking dogs, clouds skuddling by in the blue
vault of the sky. He almost wished he had never asked Angelique for
human life. He’d had no inkling he would ever have to grieve—or
what this grief would do to him. A sudden realization dawned. He
was more human than angel; he was almost entirely human. By loving so
deeply he had given up a large part of his celestial heritage.

Angelique, on the
other hand, was so little human and so large an angel that she hardly
understood the creatures she interacted with. Being her companion
and helpmate, he consorted with evil incarnate. Having been cast
from the sight and conversation with her creator, she hadn’t
embraced the earth beings she pretended to be a part of. She used
them, manipulated them, cheated, robbed, and killed them, but she
could not know what divinity they represented because she could not
empathize with their plight. They were born, lived briefly, and
died.

Angelique (and he)
would never die, never face extinction—even for a brief time.
Either on earth or in the outer reaches of creation they still lived
and were conscious. They were eternal as God himself.

Finally he
understood the true meaning of punishment. Consciousness. To know
and feel and think forever. To perceive this loneliness and
separation forever. That was what they had been granted as angels,
even as they were cast out.

He put his head into
his hands and tried to blot out the real world. He never should have
come here, to this place, with this master. He had joined a macabre
dance with Angelique that was meant to either destroy him or separate
him even further from the creator.

Loving Mary had
taught him the hard truth. He was truly lost.

He always had been.

CHAPTER 20

WANDERING THE
WASTELAND

In order to hide
from Angelique it was necessary for Nisroc—now called Nick—to
cloak his mind from her penetrating intelligence. He had no more use
for her game of voodoo, ritual sacrifice, or acquisition of earthly
wealth. It was all child’s play to him and he searched for
something more substantial. What that might be he couldn’t
say. Having experienced love, he wanted no more of it. He actually
had no idea what he really wanted. Not to be sent back to the
darkness, for one thing, he was adamant about that. Though he was
lonely among those of the earth, it was not the same loneliness he
knew while waiting in the purgatory of nothingness.

He wandered, walking
slowly, whistling softly. He left the park and took city streets
until they ended in highways. He moved that day toward the setting
sun and soon the city was at his back. He kept going, realizing the
finality of his decision to leave. Nothing could cause him to turn
back. He would walk until he tired in the night and then he would lie
down in shadow and sleep. The next day he rose up and began again,
the sun this time at his back.

The days lengthened
before him and the highway spun out into the distance, a siren
calling him forward. He walked, ambled, strolled, giving his
attention to nature—the wind, the heat, the sky and pavement he
tread. Nights he took refuge in abandoned houses, along roadsides in
ditches, beneath the trees and rocks of whatever locale he found
himself. He met a few others on the road, also wanderers, some of
them still broke by the collapse of Wall Street in 1929, others
evading the war with Germany on the horizon. He traveled with no one
for very long, happier to be on his own.

He saw many kinds of
churches and synagogues along the way, but feared entering them.
Though he had long since regretted his argument with his creator and
his choice to follow Angelique into separation and darkness, he knew
he still had no connection to God. Once turning his back, he could
never change that momentous decision. An unclean, unnatural being had
no place in a house of worship.

He ate only enough
to keep the body healthy, savoring nothing. He drank when thirsty,
took shelter from storm or cold, and kept to himself as much as
possible.

Not that there
hadn’t been times he was forced into situations where he had to
interact. Once he had been attacked by ruffians outside of a large
city in Louisiana. His clothes were not yet in tatters so he looked
like a man of means, except for the worn leather of his shoes, but
the thieves could not see the holes in the soles.

Two of the
scoundrels took him by the arms and a third rushed to strike him in
the face. Without thinking what he was doing and depending entirely
on an instinct of preservation, Nick left the ground, dragging his
two attackers with him into the air as they clung to his arms. His
wings, black as soot and larger by far than his body, lifted them
all ten feet above the ground. Yelping, they let go, plummeting to
the ground then leaping to their feet and backing away, yipping like
mongrel dogs. The man who had hit him stared up at the thing that
floated many feet above him and began to quiver all over. “What
the hell…?
Nick glared at them. “Why are you so
greedy that you think you should steal from a stranger?”

The three men backed
farther away and then the two who had taken hold of him began to run.
They disappeared into a thicket that lined the road. The third man
seemed frozen to the spot. His mouth hung open and he looked like a
beached carp unable to draw breath. Finally he was able to speak.
“What in God’s name are you?”

Nick began to laugh,
the sound full and throaty and full of sarcasm. His laughter further
unnerved the would-be thief. His eyes bulged and saliva dripped from
his slack lips. Suddenly Nick was silent. After a few pregnant
moments while the man below him waited in stunned wonderment Nick
said in a quiet, menacing voice, “Run.”

The man hesitated no
longer. He turned and ran after his companions as if his legs were
on fire and the devil on his heels.

Nick came back to
earth, wiped the spot of blood from his mouth where he had been hit.
His great wings folded and were drawn down and back until they
vanished. As he walked on, Nick wondered what might have happened if
he’d swooped over them with a cry for vengeance. Or if he'd
lifted the two men even higher into the sky.

Days after this
incident he was on a little used road far from any town or city and
night was coming on. He yearned to hear a voice, any voice, and to
share a meal with someone, for he had not eaten in two days. He came
upon a farm house, its paint peeling, a flea-bitten dog in the yard.
Hearing the clink of glass on glass, Nick saw colored bottles
dangling by the dozens in a nearby cottonwood tree.

He approached
cautiously, intrigued by the place. It was so isolated, yet he could
tell someone lived here.

The dog stood up and
wagged a long, black tail. He showed his teeth in a smile. Nick
reached down and ruffled the fur at its neck. The dog followed him
up the rickety steps to the front door.

Suddenly the door
was flung open and a woman stood before him. She was in her fifties,
he surmised, a rotund woman of wide girth. Her hair was a mass of
frazzled gray curls and her ocean gray eyes blazed with an
intelligence he hadn’t seen in a long while.

He put up his hands
in surrender though she carried no weapon. “I’m sorry if
I scared you. I’ve been on the road and I’m hungry. I’d
be happy to work for a meal if you can spare it.”

“
You’re
a pretty boy,” she said, surprising him. She stepped onto the
porch so that he had to step back from her. “I’m not
scared of you, though, if that’s what you think.”

He waited and knew
he dare not smile.

“
See that box
of bottles over there?” She pointed to the end of the porch
where a wooden crate stood full of all manner of glass bottles—cold
drink bottles, medicine bottles, food bottles. A rainbow of glass.

He nodded. “Yes,
m’am.”

“
There’s
a roll of wire in there. Hang those bottles for me in the bottle
tree and then come inside. I’ll feed you.”

She left him to it.
He carried the crate to the willow tree, found the roll of rusty
wire, and a pair of wire snips. He carefully threaded wire around
each bottle neck and hung them one by one from the branches. He saw
there was a sort of pattern to the display and tried to follow it,
placing each bottle equidistant from its neighbors. A wind came up
as he worked, rattling the bottles so it sounded like the bones of
skeletons dancing in the near evening.

The moon had risen
while he worked. The dog watched while he attached the last bottle,
then followed him back to the porch and the open door. Light spilled
from within to throw his outline as a long shadow. The scent of meat
and vegetables cooking in a pot caused his mouth to fill with water.

She motioned him to
sit at the table while she took up the stew and ladled some into a
bowl for him. She took a chair across the table, filling a bowl for
herself and one for the dog. She set the dog’s bowl on the
floor at her feet.

It smelled
delicious. He could taste garlic and onion and a variety of spices
as he hurriedly ate the stew. She ate more slowly, all the while
keeping an eye on him.

“
This is too
kind of you,” he said as she refilled his bowl and handed him a
thick crust of bread to go with it.

“
You’re
not right,” she said, startling him.

He looked up from
beneath hair that had grown long and shaggy over his forehead. He had
been around long enough to know that when humans lived alone too long
they often began to speak whatever came into their minds. There was
no stopper. There wasn't even a latch. It all spilled out. It
sometimes startled him, but not to the point where he was unnerved
because he understood it.

“
You’re
not what you seem to be, is what I mean,” she explained. Her
mouth was pursed and her brow wrinkled in question.

She was what he
thought of as a far-seer. He recognized that quality about her now.
She saw more than was normally seen; she saw the underneath. He had
discovered over the long years that some human beings were more
gifted than others. Some read minds, some saw the future before it
happened, and some, like this woman, saw down below the skin and
flesh to the heart of things.

“
Am I right?”
she prodded, holding him fast in a steady gaze.

He nodded, but
continued to eat the flavorful stew, his eyes averted from her.

“
You’re
not bad,” she said. “But you’re…lost…and
I don’t mean lost on the road.” She took a spoonful of
the stew, but never stopped looking at him.

“
Perceptive,”
he said, wiping out the bowl with the last crust of bread and then
popping it into his mouth. “But what makes you think I’m
not ‘bad’?”

“
Mo-mo didn’t
bite you. In fact, he took to you right off. That’s the only
reason I let you handle my bottles.”

The dog glanced up
at his mistress at the mention of his name. His snout went right
back down into the bowl. He liked the stew as well as the people at
the table.

“
You always
rely so much on the dog? Is that wise?” He pushed back from
the table to contemplate her.

“
He knows more
than me and you both.”

“
I see. Well,
he’s a treasure then, what with you out here by yourself.”

She stood and began
to clear the table. She took the empty and tongue-wiped clean bowl
from the dog. “I’m not alone if I got Mo-Mo so you’re
awfully mistaken.”