I’m suddenly so dizzy, so giddy, I can’t type straight and I need to wait until my sight clears, until Lela’s crazy heartbeat is roughly back under my control.
He writes:
Mercy? Are you still there?
And I reply, still clinging to that necessary veneer of distance:
Can you be specific?
Am I flirting? I’m no good at flirting.
You know exactly what I mean. The words race themselves to fill the screen. This is hard enough.
I reply: Humour me. Humour someone who’s had everything they’ve ever known taken away from them.
There’s another long pause. Then the words: What are you?
He adds: You promised me once that you’d answer that question when we got Lauren back. Then you went and disappeared off the face of the earth.
I feel the corners of Lela’s mouth quirk upwards and think for a while before typing cautiously:
The people who put me in here say that the knowledge is in me. But I can’t access it. I’m not a ghost, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’m very much alive. And I’m not a bad . . . person. Not any more. There are things I can do that I don’t understand. But I have a physical form. Lauren mhave told you. I saw myself in Carmen, can see myself in Lela Neill, as I could in the reflections of some of the others. I’m getting stronger. My ability to remember is beginning to regenerate. But I don’t know if what I am is worthy of . . . love.
It’s a leading statement and, mentally, I kick myself for even mentioning the word. But he continues to sidestep the real reason we’ve blundered towards each other again, even though we’re separated by oceans, by continents, by logic itself.
He types:
After you left, Lauren described you to a sketch artist, a guy we know who’s a court reporter. I have his sketch taped up in my room, carry a copy of it in my wallet. I know what you look like. Would know what you look like anywhere. Lauren was the one who saw the resemblance. She knows a bit about art and she said you look like the Delphic Sybil, but your eyes are brown. Now that’s how I think of you. Kind of sacred. Magical. Not-of-this-world.
I make a mental note to look up this Delphic Sybil and write back, grinning:
She’d better be pretty, this Sybil character. So what do we do next?
His response is swift.
It’s Tuesday where you are, Monday here. I’ll be there by Friday your time. There are a few things I need to do here first, a few people I need to talk to. I’ve started studying again so I’m playing catch-up big time. There’s a lot I’ve missed out on. Dad says it’s thanks to you (well, Carmen!) that this little miracle has come to pass. And I may just do that, finally. Pass (LOL).
Lauren sends her love. She’s getting better, too. Some days are better than others. But she knows that she wouldn’t be here without you and she wants so much to thank you properly. She’s not officially back with Rich Coates, although he doesn’t let her out of his sight these days. They spend almost all their time together.
The news makes me smile. Hooray for second chances, I think.
He adds:
Don’t argue. I know you like to argue. I’ve already booked a ticket. I know where the Green Lantern is — I’ve looked it up online. I’ll get there in the morning, I’m coming straight from the airport. So just wait for me. Try not to go anywhere until I get there. Think you can do that?
Lela’s hands are a little unsteady as I write:
That question you asked me? I think it’s definitely possible. And I’ll be right here, waiting.
I frown, remembering, and add:
But Lela might not be able to leave right away. Her mother’s really sick. I might need to wait. But it won’t be long. Days, maybe hours. Just a feeling I get.
Ryan’s response is swift and joyous.
See you Friday. Friday! It doesn’t matter if we have to wait. I haven’t stopped thinking of you since you left. I’ll wait. I9;ll wait forever if I have to.
I don’t trust myself to reply, just close out of the chat screen with a feeling in my heart like sun on the water. Though that little voice in my head’s reminding me all the while just to stick to the plan.
Chapter 12
It’s 5.03 pm when I let myself into Lela’s house on Highfield Street. The place is so quiet that I’m afraid of what I might find. But Georgia’s in the front room, packing up her gear, and she smiles when she sees me.
‘See you in the morning, God willing,’ she says quietly as I show her out.
I nod.
There’s a lamp burning in Lela’s mother’s bedroom, the familiar whirr of the humidifier running in the corner, the smell of incense and jasmine oil this evening. Mrs Neill turns towards the door as I enter and her gaze is almost luminous, though her eyes are sunken and the yellow of their whites seems more pronounced than ever.
I grab hold of Lela’s chair, and as I pull it closer towards the wasted figure in the bed, I see that there are tears on her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers, one thin hand grasping at the air above her bedclothes. ‘I know I’ve turned your life upside down, darling, and you’ve got every right to be angry, but you’ve been so good to me, Lel. You’ve never once raised your voice, or been impatient with me. No child should ever have to see their parent this way . . .’ She taps at something beneath the covers, attached to her body, and there’s a flat sound, as if she’s hitting hard plastic. ‘They’ve made a jigsaw puzzle out of me, Lel,’ she half-laughs, half-cries, and I realise that she’s trying to reach out for her daughter’s hand. My hand. ‘Only nothing quite fits together any more.’
She needs something from me, this woman. It’s more than just a feeling I get. She needs permission to go. And forgiveness. And the reassurance that Lela will be okay without her. I don’t need to touch her to know it. There’s something still unfinished between mother and daughter. Something unsaid.
I think of all the hurting words that Lela sensibly confined to her journal and never let pass her lips.
Call me a sentimental fool, but I lean forward now and place a hand on her sleeve, murmuring, ‘I love you, Mum, in case I ever forgot to tell you that. I love you, and you’ve never been a burden. You’ve done everything for me, you’ve been the best mum I could have hoped for, and I honour you for that.’
Lela’s mother closes her eyes, her mouth curving up in a tremulous smile, though tears leak out slowly from below her eyelids, leaving tracks down her gaunt cheeks. She doesn’t bother to wipe them away, so I do, then I place my hand on her forehead again, thinking that the gesture might ease her suffering, as it seemed to do once before.
The tension that is always there, like a knot inside, seems to leave Mrs Neill’s body, to disappear with my touch. Only, it’s as if my palm has suddenly become welded to her skin and I’m the one with the terminal disease, because, all of a sudden, I can’t move.
There’s something flowering between us, as if I’ve opened up a direct connection between my mind and hers, so that if she knew how, she might be able to read my thoughts, mine my memories for knowledge of me, the real me, as the malakh had tried to do.
But no, it’s nothing so simple as that.
It’s as if something has taken me beyond what’s inside the woman’s head. I can see inside her body; in some way I am become of her body. It’s like I’ve opened a doorway to the grand morphology, the physiology, of Mrs Neill. Her senses are my senses — I feel the intermittent stab of the morphine pump, the slow release of the corticosteroid in her system, the dull, constant ache of the weeping stoma in her abdomen, the bag that is anchored there. The overheated room, the exterior world, they’ve disappeared. She is laid out like a map before me: the highways of her bones, the canals of her lymphatic and cardiovascular systems, her connective tissue, her muscles, her nerves. All of them there. All of them laid bare.
Most of all, I feel her great love for her daughter, the howling fear she carries inside, all of it swirling behind that brave façad
e she buckles on, like armour, every day.
And though every fibre in me rebels, is screaming at me to rise up, out, of this red-hued world of nightmare, the cathedral of pain, remembrance and regret that is Mrs Neill’s self-devouring body, I tell myself to go under, to let the tide take me —
— I can’t begin to describe the feeling.
If Mrs Neill weren’t already unconscious from her latest hit of morphine, I’m sure she’d be able to feel my clumsy spirit navigating the chaotic metropolis within her slight frame. It’s like the wildest raceway in the universe, the human body, and I’m being pushed along, I’ve surrendered all volition. I have no control over the physical world, and no idea where I’m headed, how I’m supposed to use this incredible feeling of power, of . . . boundlessness. Capable of passing through the smallest micromolecule, the thinnest cell wall, yet unable to direct that weird sensation of being sentient yet liquid; at once mercurial, permeating, yet impermeable.
Once, I was able to do this; once. But the manual’s gone. If not erased, then altered, written in unreadable code.
Think. The voice inside me is stern. Think how it was, in that dream.
That fearful, punishing dream where Luc took us straight through an asteroid. Through solid matter.
I need less of Lela and more of me. That’s clear. If it’s truly possible to atomise, to scatter one’s energies into any shape one might desire, then maybe I can, too, even as damaged and malformed as I currently am. I glimpsed the possibility of it in my sleep,and this proves it. The ability resides in me. But the mechanism — like the meaning of the word elohim — is missing from my recall. Not lost, only forgotten.
Luc told me himself once: The knowledge is in you. But where?
I’ve lost all sense of time and place when I finally chance upon the epicentre of Karen Neill’s agony. It’s some kind of invasive mass that’s an angry red-yellow in colour, like a nest of plump worms, anchored deep into the walls and surrounding muscle of some long, tubular organ in the body that continuously winds back on itself. There’s evidence near the ugly, swelling mass of past surgeries, barely healed, that failed to halt the body’s instinct for self-annihilation.
All around me, diseased cells are exploding into life. They divide, mutate, evolve, until they are literally cannibalising healthy tissue in every direction. When I come into contact with them, I realise that these cells do not grow old and fade as cells are supposed to do; they have achieved a kind of voracious immortality, would turn on me, too, if I were truly flesh.
I feel like I’m drowning; that if I don’t soon find a way out, I will never be able to leave. But I also know that what I’m witnessing is both a privilege and a burden, and I gather myself like floodwater, like a plague of locusts, like the Holy Ghost itself, and surge through that cancerous mass. I flow through every site of disease and infection I come across, willing myself to burn the sickness from Karen Neill’s body, to purge her clean.
But I can’t. Everything I see, touch, taste, smell and feel that carries the taint of illness remains tainted after my passing. Finally that small voice says in me: This one is meant to die. This one cannot be saved. Azraeil has already placed his mark on her.
There is nothing more to be done.
Immediately I think these things, there is a sensation of abrupt coalescence and I am flung out of Karen Neill’s body, or pulled back — as if by an elastic and invisible cord — into Lela.
I come to, to find myself sweating and shaking and thanking God I got out of there alive.
Mrs Neill sleeps on, dreaming of who knows what?
Finally I sleep, too. Spent.
And dream — not of Luc, of his indelible beauty, his serpentine grace; not of Ryan, his mortal double — but of a fine, silver mist that enters the room. So subtly at first that it is already at the level of my ankles and rising slowly when, in my dream, I wake and rise out of the chair beside Mrs Neill’s bed, leaving Lela’s sleeping body still in it.
In my dream, I am myself as I once was. Tall, pale, shining. Like a being made of pure fire.
I look for the source of that thin fog that is building steadily, taking the warmth out of the air. It is not moonlight that leaves a thin pall of silver over everything: over Mrs Neill’s thin, pinched features, over Lela, sleeping, over the teetering possessions in this room, pushed aside to make way for bedpans and of it ibasins, a wheelchair and a ventilator, the paraphernalia that dogs the terminally ill, making them seem even more earthbound in their final days.
And I see him.
I give a start, feel a cold flash race across my skin.
He is standing with his back to me before one of the long, curtained windows, his palely glowing hand holding aside the heavy fabric as he looks out onto the moon-stained garden, now overgrown with nightshade and bridal creeper. He has gleaming silver hair, worn a little too long for fashion. Every strand straight, even and perfectly the same. And when he turns to look at me — his eyes as blue as the daytime sky but which can darken to near night when he is angered, his face youthful and incorruptible — I know him for who he is, and I bow my head to that vision both terrible and wonderful.
‘Lord Azraeil,’ I say aloud, his name recalled at once in the beholding.
Mercy, he says inside my mind, for he has no need for speech. They tell me that it is what you have taken to calling yourself these days.
His tone is amused. He approaches me slowly, seeming to glide, his feet never quite meeting the surface of the stretched and faded carpet laid down in this room decades ago. Azraeil does not favour the snowy-white raiment that I have come to expect of my erstwhile brethren, my tormentors. He wears what he likes, I remember, so long as it’s black.
He stops mere inches from me. He does not seek to touch me, nor I him, because few ever recover from Azraeil’s touch. Even among the elohim — for that is what he is, one of the High Ones, almost the highest — he is a power unto himself, a force that straddles worlds and states, life and death. He has no need for stratagems, for politics, the taking of sides. He is power incarnate; the possessor of a singular ability bestowed on none other but himself.
And my dreaming self reminds me that he is here for reasons known only to himself. I know, without knowing how, that he is not one of the Eight come to gloat over me. Though even in my dream, the irony strikes me as cruel. No doubt when I was first reborn in a mortal body — outcast, bereft, confused, utterly alone — I must have cried out for the services of this man, this being more than man.
Why are you here? I say into his mind. Why now? You are several millennia too late, my friend. I no longer need your ‘help’. I might have once, but no longer.
There is laughter in his reply. The years have dulled your wits, my friend. I’m not here for you, clearly. He raises a shimmering hand and points a finger at the figure in the bed. But I may not take her yet.
I frown. I have seen the ruination of her body, Azraeil. Only fear and love are keeping her here. She is ready. End her suffering. Take her.
Perhaps there is something self-serving in my words. For even in my dream, I know that if Karen Neill is gone I will be free to fly the nest with Ryan as soon as he arrives, leaving Lela’s old life behind without guilt, without ackward glance.
Azraeil’s eyes are piercing and I see that he sees what is in my heart.
By and by, he replies. But she is supposed to go with one other. At the very hour, the very minute, the very instant, the two must go together. And so I must wait to reap them both. But not for much longer.
In the jump-cut way of dreams, I suddenly find myself looking up at him from out of Lela’s eyes again. Like a djinn called back into the bottle, I am shackled once more inside her body. Azraeil seems so very tall now, standing between Lela and her mother’s sleeping form. As beautiful, bright and alien as the stars.
He moves so quickly that I am taken by surprise. He bends low, reaching out with his glowing hands, his breath sweet and warm on Lela’s features, mine. The in
stant he cups the contours of Lela’s face, I wake, shaken by the gesture, knowing that if it had not been a dream, Lela would already be dead, and I, fled, gone, departed.
In the early morning, when golden light begins to seep in through the heavy drapes, Mrs Neill wakes with difficulty and murmurs, ‘I had the strangest dream, Lel. I thought I woke and saw you sleeping there, in your usual place, but your skin . . . it was glowing. It wasn’t moonlight. It was like there was a light on inside you. It was so . . . beautiful.’
‘It was a dream, Mum,’ I reply gently, holding up my free hand to be examined. ‘It’s just ordinary skin, highly susceptible to sunburn, as you know.’
And the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, I add silently.
I stand up and stretch. ‘I’ll be home early today. I’ll ask Mr Dymovsky if I can cut short my shift so that we can spend more time together.’
‘Why, love?’ she whispers. ‘It’s good for you to get out of the house. I don’t feel any worse than usual. Nothing’s going to carry me off today.’
Her quiet laugh turns into a fit of coughing that goes on and on.
I bend and give her some water, a kiss, tell her I’ll see her soon. Not bothering to advise her that Azraeil is waiting. Waiting around for that specific purpose.
Chapter 13
‘What do you mean you need to leave early today?’ Mr Dymovsky cries when I tell him what I’ve decided. ‘Reggie, she is the no-show. No phone call. Nothing.’
We’ve just survived the madness of the breakfast run, surfing another giant wave of takeout coffees and toasted bacon and egg sandwich specials. The café is deserted now, save for me, Cecilia, Sulaiman, the boss.
‘Delayed onset of shock?’ I suggest half-heartedly.
Mr Dymovsky rolls his express">Weyes at me. ‘You are unshockable,’ he says, wagging his head of flyaway grey hair. ‘That’s precisely why you were hired.’
‘My mother’s dying,’ I remind him softly. ‘It won’t be long. I can feel it.’ He searches Lela’s face and, satisfied by what he sees there, replies gravely, ‘Now that is a reason I understand. Of course, you may leave early. But only after the lunch rush is over. Sulaiman does not have your way with people.’