Mercy (15 page)

That’s what you get for trying to impress the boy
, I think bitterly.

‘I remember checking Masson out,’ Ryan says with a frown. ‘He’s got a wife and two small boys, one with some kind of learning disorder. They live out by the burnt-down old cannery near the waterfront, and their place is tiny. It’s not a church either. Like I told you, I checked out the Paradise High choir crowd and they came up clean. We could look at Masson again,’

he finishes doubtfully, ‘but it’d probably be a waste of time.’

‘Oh,’ I say, because there’s nothing else
to
say.

There’s a sharp tap on the door and Ryan and I shift away from each other guiltily, even though we aren’t actually touching each other, or even close enough to touch.

‘Dinner, children,’ Mrs Daley says tiredly before moving away.

‘After you,’ Ryan mutters, holding the door open a minute later, frustration in his voice.

169

Ryan, Louisa Daley and I make polite, but limited, conversation at dinner before Louisa insists that we
run along now
, refusing to let either of us help with the dishes. As I leave the room behind Ryan, she furiously scrapes leftover food into the waste bin while she tries not to let us see her cry. Just business as usual, then.

Disappointment has turned Ryan in on himself again, and we part company outside Lauren’s bathroom door without a word said, without a new plan for tomorrow, which leaves me feeling strangely restless, dissatisfied.

Inside her bedroom, I switch off all the lights and pace the pristine carpet for a while, so wired I can’t possibly sleep. I go over all of the angles, the dead ends, and it’s none for none every time.

170

Lauren’s eyes in her photos seem to follow me around the room. Even in the absolute dark, I can make out every image that contains her — photos of sleepovers, choir friends, pen friends, endless parties forever frozen in time. Her ash-blonde hair seems to glow, much as my own reflection does when I pace past the mirrored dresser for the umpteenth time. I have just over a week left to make a difference in Ryan’s life before I’m bussed back to whatever dismal place Carmen comes from, or vanish out of this life altogether, into another. And I can’t see how either is possible. To resolve things; to leave him.

Maybe Carmen herself is just filler. Some kind of corporeal way station. I don’t want to believe that. I’d like to think that I’m supposed to take something out of this life, or, rather, put something back — for somebody, if not for me.

I throw myself down on the bed, finally, thinking that sleep will evade me this night, and wake suddenly, hours later, paralysed and choking.

There’s a tall figure standing at the foot of the bed, and I can’t move a muscle to speak, lift a finger, run.

Is
he
doing it to me? Or is it
her
fear that’s holding me down?

171

I discover that the only things I am able to move are Carmen’s eyes. I watch the man drift in place, as if his feet do not touch the ground. So tall, the ceiling almost cannot contain him.

Very little scares me, and yet the shining one — who is so like me he could be my brother, my twin — stands over me with judgment in his eyes, a living flame cupped in his left hand, and I am very afraid.

‘I don’t believe him,’ he says, as if refuting something I have just said aloud.

Light shines out of every pore of his body as if he’s made of it. His voice is at once so terrible, so beautiful, like thunder advancing from a great distance, a bright bugle call, that I cannot believe Ryan can be sleeping mere metres away and not hear him.

‘
You
can’t have
changed
.’ The stranger’s tone is incredulous. ‘It isn’t in you; you were always so adamantine, so … inflexible.’

I want to scream at him to stop speaking in riddles, but it’s as if I’m fixed to the bed by a force-field of energy so powerful I cannot make my corded neck work. It is almost worse than my fear of heights, this feeling of utter entombment, Carmen’s skin and bones a living shroud in which I am tightly bound. The sensation of being buried 172

alive is at once so powerful and so terrifying that I feel tears spring to her eyes, roll down her frozen features.

Don’t do this to me!
I wail inside her head as sweat breaks out upon her skin, drenching the pristine white sheets on which we lie. Carmen’s eyes wheel in fear as we, together, struggle to focus on the being at the foot of the bed.

The burning man moves so swiftly, so imperceptibly, that he’s suddenly beside me, on Carmen’s left, close enough to touch, if touch were permitted me. Light seems to leak from him in wisps, in errant curls that blur, then fade, into the cool air of Lauren’s bedroom.

His is raiment of such a bright white that I am blinded as to detail, can only perceive him in outline. Yet I know I have seen him before — even before the other night, when I glimpsed him poised silently beside the roadway.

And I realise that once I knew him when I was truly alive and inhabiting my own skin. How I know this, I cannot be sure.

Bending low, he whispers in a voice to rend steel, to rend stone, ‘I wanted to see for myself how you have

“changed”. It seems that he has overreached himself, as usual, in his description of you. I see no indication of a shift.’

173

He turns away from me, as if aggrieved, or disappointed. Prepared to vanish back into the vortex he stepped out of.

There is a slight lessening of the strange pressure that binds me to Lauren’s bed and I gasp, despite myself,

‘Uri?’ Something subterranean and unheralded in me, recognising something in him.

The tall figure stiffens, turns back quickly. Bends again to inspect me, as if I am a curio, an oddity, from another age.

His voice is like a muted roar, like waves breaking across all the world’s oceans in tandem, a thunderclap to split the skies. ‘What — did — you —
say
?’

I know I should feel fear; I have been cautioned —

by Luc, more than once — to be fearful. But that does not even begin to describe what is in my heart.

The being, Uri, raises his left hand, the living flame cupped in it, the better to see her, the better to see
me
within. Plays it across Carmen’s unremarkable features, her slight figure stretched out beneath the covers of Lauren’s bed.

His lip curls.
So puny, so mortal
. I can almost read his thoughts.

I could always read his thoughts.

174

‘
Uri
,’ I cry again, as if I am drowning. ‘I
know
you.’

And for a moment, it is as if an invisible hand is at my throat, crushing Carmen’s windpipe until the room turns black at the edges, purple in my sight, the outline of the physical world wavering.

I am suddenly fearful that it may be possible to die in another’s body and I choke out, ‘You — don’t — scare

— me. You — never —
did
.’

‘Liar,’ says the figure of power. ‘I can
smell
your human fear. The intervening years have made you weak.

Perhaps he was right. You
have
changed, if only to become even
less
than you were.’

There are those strange emphases again, and I struggle to draw breath into the girl’s livid body and at the same time comprehend his meaning.

He laughs harshly. ‘How would we have been able to keep you from him at every turn, if that were not the case?’

He laughs again at that. And, subtly, the energy in the room, the strange, sapping power, increases, until the air fairly crackles with it, and I am made rigid, as if electrified by live current. Helpless with longing for movement, for air, for what once was. We were friends, I am sure of it. We laughed; we were equals.

175

‘We ruled the world,’ he says softly, as if he has read it from my mind, and I know it for the truth.

‘Bully,’ I manage to gasp out.

‘Traitor,’ he replies swiftly, menace in his voice.

The word makes no sense to me, my recall having inconveniently hit a wall.

For an unguarded moment he relaxes his absolute dominion over me and in that instant, I reach out and grab his hand, like someone going under for the last time.

It is white, his skin, like marble or alabaster, without flaw, and smooth as fired glass or porcelain. Unlined on any surface.

I turn his palm over, and see that Carmen’s small hand is lost in it, when the burning begins. Quickly it engulfs her left arm, her torso, all of her, until we are incandescent, rigid in fiery glory.

Uri looks down on us … with pity? Compassion?

We burn,
burn
, and our mouth is stretched wide to scream, to bring the walls of this house down, when I see, I see —

— two great human armies doing battle on a desert plain; beings like Uri among them, above them, on the ramparts of the beleaguered city, doing nothing 176

save watch as hundreds go down, armoured and on horseback, on foot. Called to their deaths by blaring horn and sackbut; a tide of red, human blood sinking into the unforgiving sand as the watchers do nothing.

Uri, suspended, like a star, above the dome of a great stone mosque, the walls of a sprawling pink desert fort at sunset, the keep of a floating palace haunted by music and the scent of jasmine, the peak of the tallest mountain in the world, the bell tower of a city overrun by plague and death. Uri, falling from the sky yet landing lightly upon the surface of the earth. Uri, passing like a spirit through the bodies of a magnitude without leaving any sensation of his passage. Uri, in a thousand improbable places, yet bending the laws of nature with ease.

Then the years peel back — or do they run forwards?

— as cities are raised then sacked, then raised again.

Always the new upon the old — or the old upon the new

— until pattern, memory, coherence all waver and blur with the rapid passage of time. As I watch through his eyes, the sun and moon streak across the sky continually as fires, famines, wars destroy cities. Civilisations —

both celebrated and forgotten — begin to snake out across the surface of the world as vines are wont to do, buildings grow more opulent, more complex, ever 177

taller, like plants reaching towards the sun. We traverse continents, seas, forests, mountains, vast ice floes —

experience all of this together, strangely conjoined —

as seasons change, and all that is around us alters then decays then alters again. Always and everywhere, the faces of millions — of every creed, colour, age, station

— wither and become as dust, and among them walk the shining ones, ever watchful yet held apart. Unseen by any save their own kind. Rarely moved to intervene.

Time bends, sound, light, distance, perspective, and all around me the shifting world and everything in it.

Until, for an instant, I see, I see —

—
Uri and seven brethren arrayed against
me
—

all beautiful, all terrible, their instruments of power raised high — and behind them, a glorious multitude in white, the great universe wheeling and turning about us.

Planets, stars, suns, moons, the greater and lesser bodies fly by; comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space twist and curl overhead like a painted, yet living, ever-changing dome.

Home
.

The word catches in me.

I know this is a true memory, one of my earliest, for beside me I
sense
Luc — my heart leaping — another 178

shining multitude arrayed at
our
backs, the two of us the epicentre of something vast, a conflagration waiting to happen, an ache in time, a breath suspended.

Then I
see
him, my beloved — like a lion, like a sun god when he walks — as if I am reliving the moment, as if the moment is now. And before I can turn to him, speak, lay my hands upon him in fearful gratitude for the miracle of such restoration — how long have I waited for this?
How long?
— I hear him say, ‘Then, as an act of faith
—
of
goodwill
—shall we call it — take that which is most precious to me.’ His tone is final, without emotion, a death knell. ‘I permit it.’

And then I feel searing pain in my left hand, the original pain, the wound that begot all wounds, all misfortunes, thereafter, and then the world goes white and blank.

And I am rendered deaf, dumb and blind. For all purposes,
dead
to that shining multitude, removed from them in an instant, cut off forever, as if a limb amputated, never to return.

And I am lost again, as I am suddenly hurled out of contact with the being, Uri, who is clearly shaken.

‘
Exaudi nos, Domine
,’ he whispers as he looks at the place where our two hands were joined, as if a new 179

scar might have formed there. It could have been days or mere seconds that we touched.

‘You of all people should know how it works, Uri,’

I reply. ‘The Lord only helps those who help themselves, remember?’ As I say the words, I discover that I am finally able to sit upright. I hug Carmen’s bony knees gingerly as I look up into Uri’s beautiful countenance, startle a crooked smile from him.

‘
That
, my friend, is where we differ in philosophical outlook,’ he says, a touch ruefully. ‘A shift has indeed occurred, it would seem. Disturbingly, my informant does not prove false.’

Time is short in every sense, so while I am able, while the creature’s mood nears benevolence (as much as one such as he is able to feel benevolence), I say raggedly,

‘Then help me this time? I need to find her. I need you to intervene. Just this once. For me. Such a small thing, brother.’