that the thing inside her must be something like me. The creatures somehow soul-jacked June in my very presence, much the same way as I’ve taken over Lela Neill.
It’s electrifying, the thought that I might be facing something like myself. Something split off, something lost. In all my years in the wilderness, I have never met anyone or anything remotely like me, the way I am now. I know it with an awful clarity I cannot explain. It’s an exile, like I am.
As if it’s reading the thoughts right out of my head, the creature murmurs, ‘Only you would understand how this feels. How terribly . . . alone I have been. It has seemed an age without end, without pity . . .’ There’s a terrible yearning in the gravelly voice. ‘Help me?’ it pleads.
Whatever this thing is, it’s weaker than I am. It’s sick, unstable, and radiating a subtle, grey-tinted light that keeps changing in intensity.
When I raise Lela’s hands to study her fine Irish skin, there’s no answering glow. On the surface of things, I look human, could be human, except that both the creature and I know with absolute certainty that I’m not.
‘I don’t know how to help you,’ I reply softly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I sensed you,’ it murmurs as if I haven’t spoken. ‘Under the trees. I felt your passing though I could not see you. What is the secret? How is it that you are able to remain . . .’ June’s scalded hands gesture in wonder at Lela’s slight frame. ‘What was your original task?’
Task?
When it sees the confusion on my face it says urgently, ‘Why were you created? What were you sent here to do?’
All good questions. All without answers.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply truthfully. ‘I wake to find myself in a stranger’s body, over and over again. No rhyme or reason to it. This is merely who I am today. Tomorrow . . .?’ I shrug.
The creature’s voice is almost envious. ‘Would that my fate were so kind.’
Kind? Unable to comprehend what I’m hearing, I feel Lela’s brow furrow.
‘I should have done what I was created to do,’ the creature confesses softly. ‘Discharged my singular duty and melted away centuries ago. But I didn’t, because I realised that to effect the task I was created for would be akin to suicide, and is that not itself a sin against God?’
Depends who you ask, I want to say. It’s a matter of interpretation. But I don’t. Entering into theological debate at a time like this would just cause the creature more distress.
The light coming from June now is almost painfully brilliant to my eyes. But it’s still tinted that troubling, unhealthy grey. As I stare hard at the tainted aura, I’m rocked by the sudden realisation that it’s a malakh, is thing. The word comes to me unbidden, as if hard-coded into my soul: a type of being I’d long forgotten but remember now in the beholding. It’s a lower-order messenger, of what hierarchy I couldn’t tell you, exactly. All I know is that it’s some kind of rogue grunt, and things like it used to work for people like me.
It shouldn’t be here; these guys are supposed to be largely invisible, inscrutable, their ways mysterious — you get the idea. They appear, like singularities, to people like Hoshea, or Joseph Smith, or Jeanne d’Arc, ordering them to move mountains, win wars, bring back heaven on earth — simple things like that. Or to Mr or Mrs Average before they’re about to die; a precursor to the splendid everlasting, written off as a figment of the dying brain. Like I said, they’re grunts. Ordinarily, they don’t make the orders; they just deliver them. In, then out. They’re not supposed to casually take possession of a person, body and soul, or go AWOL, for years, like this one has.
‘What is your name?’ the malakh pleads. ‘What is your rank?’
Rank?
I shake my head. ‘Such knowledge has not been vouchsafed me. I am nameless, stateless, even to myself.’
‘A sad thing,’ the malakh whispers. ‘And yet the elohim have placed their mark on you. Are you not under their . . . protection?’
Elohim. The word resonates strangely in my ears. It’s something else I should know the meaning of, but, again, it’s as if the word’s been deliberately excised from my memory. When I try to pick at the edges of it, I get the same neural feedback I got from the name Carmen Zappacosta.
Do not enter.
Do. Not. Cross.
The malakh’s grating, otherworldly voice cuts through the firestorm in my head. ‘Can you not intercede with them on my behalf?’ it begs. ‘Plead my case? I did not know that to disobey, to choose . . . liberty, all that time ago would also be to choose pain everlasting. Ask them. Ask the elohim to ease my suffering, to give me a mortal body in which to end my days . . .’
I shake my head helplessly.
The subtle yet intense light that June’s skin gives off seems to build beyond bearing; begins to ripple outward in waves, like radiation from a dying star.
‘So you will not help me?’ the malakh cries, and the low-lying hum in my bones spikes painfully, the hot-cold feeling escalates, the metallic zing, zing sound that the creature emits when it shifts from place to place seems to fill every space in my mind.
‘I cannot,’ I gasp, ‘much as I would wish to.’
And I do want to help it. The thing’s suffering must be terrible, and will never be over until it finishes what it was create for. I wonder what its original task was, and whether it even exists any longer.
The malakh is leaking power now. Is it spent? Or even . . . dying? I want to look away, but I can’t. It gives a drawn-out shriek, as of something being torn apart, and the light and heat about it build and build, until, with a sound like a thunderclap that seems to come from nowhere and yet everywhere at once, it is gone.
It might all have been a dream but for the unconscious woman with the scalded hands, slumped in the seat beside me, the air thick with the sharp tang of sulphur.
There’s the ‘real’ world, I realise, and then there’s the other world that includes things like the malakh. From my strange and lonely vantage point, it seems as if one is beginning to bleed into the other.
‘Bright Meadows next stop,’ the bus driver shouts without turning around.
I look up, startled.
The bus shifts gears, a car horn sounds outside, a muffled curse filters in through the jammed-open window, borne on the hot, polluted air. Time has recommenced, it would seem, and the world around us. The bus continues on its way through ordinary streets, past ordinary people doing ordinary things. What the malakh wants but can never have.
I bend low and study the woman beside me, clocking the faint flutter of the pulse in her neck before straightening and edging my way around her sprawled form.
‘Thanks,’ I mutter as I pass the driver.
‘No worries,’ he replies tonelessly, before the door shuts behind me.
The bus swings away from the kerbside with June still on board, still unconscious. I watch it go, with a feeling like someone is dancing on my grave. I wonder if I have not just come face to face with my own fate, years, centuries, from now.
Chapter 7
I trail uneasily across the road to Lela’s place. A malakh. The details are more than a little hazy, but I don’t believe I ever really moved in the same circles as these creatures. We were never in the same . . . caste, for want of a better word. But we’re related, I know that much. The way they say that humans and bonobos are. And I don’t know why, after all this time, I’ve suddenly been able to see one.
A woman opens the front door to the Neills’ timber cottage before I’ve even pushed open the rusting gate that leads to the front yard. Her lean frame is kitted out in a short-sleeved, blue-patterned shirt and navy slacks, she has a watch on a silver chain around her neck, and her dark, greying hair is scraped back in a no-nonsense bun. Her face is calm, but I can tell she’s been waiting for me. It must be Georgia, and I say the name aloud.
She smiles at me, and I realise that I’m picking up a strong sense of what’s in her mind, like an aura around her, aChapterainty. She thinks that Mrs Neill is going to die today.
