sweat, although the air conditioner is on full blast in here, as are the two ceiling fans. The man’s eyes are wide, a blank terror in them. He looks wired.
He reaches out for my arm like a zombie and it’s instinctive when I reply sharply, ‘Don’t touch me. What do you want?’ in almost the same breath, the words running together.
‘I want you to sit down,’ he says in a weirdly controlled voice. ‘And you, and you, too.’ He swings and points a shaking finger at Sulaiman, at Cecilia behind the coffee machine. ‘Get out here.’
Cecilia and I exchange glances before she slides around the counter and comes to an uncertain standstill in front of the hot food counter.
‘You,’ he addresses Reggie, who’s just come bustling into the cafe swinging a couple of shopping bags, ‘lock the door and put up the Closed sign. No one comes in or goes out.’
‘Now just a minute!’ Ranald blusters, computer bag on one shoulder, on the verge of leaving. ‘I’m already late.’
‘Sit,’ says the gnome, stabbing one finger at a table near the door.
It’s clear from Ranald’s face that he hates being told what to do. But, responding to something in the man’s voice, he reluctantly slides into a seat with a frown and places his computer bag between his feet.
Reggie takes the fight right up to the guy. ‘Franklin Murray, I know who you are. You buy a chicken salad sandwich from me every week. Which doesn’t entitle you to do shit, in my book, let alone pull this kind of stunt.’
Something in Reggie’s waspish tone seems to harden the teetering resolve inside Franklin Murray’s soul. Because, suddenly, the terror is gone and his face grows pale and set. He roars, loud enough to make Reggie lose her grip on one of her bags in surprise, ‘I want you all to SIT DOWN. WHY WON’T YOU SIT DOWN?’
‘I’ll call the cops,’ Reggie snaps, brassy to the last, hooking up the fallen shopping bag by one of its handles. ‘Don’t push me.’
‘Don’t push ME,’ Franklin screams again, shaking bunched fists at Reggie like an apoplectic dwarf. ‘Don’t ever push me again, you hard-faceditch of a woman. Because I have a gun.’
He pulls it out of an inner breast pocket of his suit jacket and points it at my temple.
Reggie takes one look at the weapon and quietly locks the door and turns the sign to read Closed.
‘Pull down all the blinds,’ Franklin orders.
Reggie does as she’s told without even a hint of backchat. He waves his gun at her and she sits at an empty table, shopping abandoned in the walkway near the door.
‘You!’ Franklin addresses Sulaiman rudely. ‘You deaf as well as stupid? Get in here with the rest of them.’
Sulaiman complies, but takes his time. He doesn’t look afraid; in fact, he’s showing no emotion at all. He’s like a man mountain, broad and well over six feet tall. The man with the handgun would be lucky to clear five and a half in lifts.
‘SIT,’ Franklin yells nervously at him.
‘I would prefer to stand,’ Sulaiman rumbles, wiping his hands on his apron front then tugging his cook’s cap off his head of short, black curls.
‘I’ll hit her,’ Franklin threatens, indicating me with the muzzle of the gun.
Sulaiman glances sharply at me before pulling out a chair and sinking into it carefully. It creaks as he pushes it back to give himself more leg room. He tosses his cap onto the table in front of him as if he is throwing down a challenge.
Satisfied, Franklin marches me back over to the seat I’d only just vacated and pushes me down into it. And that’s when I feel it. Like an energy, at once hot and cold, hair-raising, like a hum, like vinegar in my bones.
I glance around sharply, looking for the source of that feeling, see an errant patch of light move across the wall near the air conditioner, see it fly across the face of the coffee machine a second later, get lost in the lit-up hot-food display, in the reflective chrome of the chair legs and seat backs.
The malakh’s inside the room with us, and no one knows it but me. The real world, the other world, quietly, imperceptibly, bleeding one into the other.
Franklin waves his gun at Cecilia without speaking and she slides into an empty chair, crossing her arms protectively around herself.
‘What are you planning to do to us?’ Ranald calls out. ‘People are going to miss me, you know. You chose the wrong guy to mess with.’
‘Oh yeah? You look like a low-level functionary to me,’ Franklin shoots back, and Ranald’s expression darkens into fury for a moment. ‘I want you to pray, that’s what I want you to do. Because I’m going to kill every single one of you and then I’m going to kill myself. That will show them.’
‘Show who?’ I ask quietly, and the black, single- barrelled handgun swings back in my direction.
Out of the corner of my eye I watch a smudge of light settle on the floor at Ranald’s feet, slide on a moment later, pool beneath the table at which Cecilia is seated.
The malakh’s so close now that the energy it gives off is almost painful. The grating zing, zing noise it makes every time it moves is vibrating in my bones.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I say into the barrel of Franklin’s gun, more curious than afraid. ‘What would drive you to destroy a room full of strangers? Or yourself?’
I don’t believe for a second that he means it. I don’t need to touch him to know that he’s literally oozing fear. He’s a coward, a bragger, a big-noter. He’ll never pull the trigger. On me, or himself. The man’s just looking for a spot on the nightly news, crying out for some good old- fashioned attention.
‘I poured my blood into that company,’ Franklin’s voice begins to shake, along with his gun hand, ‘and they “rationalised” my job out of existence. I’m fifty-two years old. My wife . . .’ he’s openly weeping now, tears streaming down his cheeks, into his beard, snot running down his face, ‘will not remotely understand when I tell her that I will shortly be forced to declare bankruptcy. She buys a new wardrobe for each goddamned season. She’s the type of woman who throws new clothes away unworn with their tags still attached. She will not comprehend it when I tell her that we are on the brink of losing everything.’
I frown, watch the blur of light leach slowly across the floor. Settle almost up against one of Franklin’s shiny Italian loafers.
‘I’m going to make them pay — in blood,’ the little man sobs.
‘You will be in hell, Franklin,’ Sulaiman warns from his chair.
‘SHUT UP!’ Franklin yells. ‘I didn’t ask for your opinion, darkie. There’s no such place as hell.’
‘It’s not just a place,’ Sulaiman answers, undeterred. ‘It’s a state. And your soul will be lost to it immediately if you do what you say you intend.’
The little puddle of light seems to shiver, to lift partway off the greasy linoleum, at Sulaiman’s words.
‘Do you want me to shoot you first?’ Franklin shrieks, peeling the gun off me and pointing it at Sulaiman. ‘Because I will. I’m not here for a lesson in theology from someone like you.’ He spits on the ground.
‘You wouldn’t know the first thing about someone like me,’ Sulaiman answers gravely.
Franklin cocks the hammer of the gun with the thumb of his right hand and steps backwards into the pool of light at his feet.
In the strange manner I sometimes have of taking in too much too quickly, I register in an instant that the light is gone. Gone into Franklin Murray.
Franklin begins to claw wordlessly at his corded neck with his free hand as the malakh takes possession of his body. ‘I — can’t — breathe,’ he gasps, eyes bulging. He seems to be dancing on the spot to some crazy beat that only he can hear. The malakh’s power must be weakening because Franklin’s actually trying to fight it off.
I see Reggie shoot a look across the room at Cecilia. Ranald is watching the little man scratch at his face, at his torso, with wide eyes.
Franklin’s skin is giving off that sickly grey glow now, although no one in the room but me seems to notice.
‘Give me the gun, Franklin,’ Sulaiman says with narrowed eyes. ‘You don’t want to do this.’
His words have the opposite effect. In a state beyond rage, beyond reason, Franklin pulls the trigger.
Do I imagine that I hear the firing pin striking the primer, the explosion of some unstable compound within, the roar of a secondary ignition, the cartridge leaving the chamber? Do I imagine that I react in the same moment
