If Angels Fight (16 page)
Authors: Richard Bowes
Julia caught the amusement and look of calculation in her husband’s eyes. Did his kid in short pants gain him more votes from women who thought it was adorable than he lost from men who thought it was snooty?
“In matters like this, we defer to the upper chamber,” he said with a quick, lopsided smile and nodded to Julia.
She felt all the pangs of a mother whose child is growing up. But she negotiated briskly. The first demand was a throwaway as she and her son both knew.
“No crewcut. None of the boys at your school have them. The brothers don’t approve.” The brothers made her Protestant skin crawl. But they were most useful at times like this.
“Long pants outside school? Please!” he asked. “Billy Chervot and his brothers all get to wear blue jeans!” Next year would be Timothy’s last with the brothers. Then he’d be at Grafton and out in the world.
“Perhaps. For informal occasions.”
“Jeans!”
“We shall see.” He would be wearing them, she knew, obviously beloved, worn ones. On a drizzly morning in Maine. His hair would be short. He’d have spent that summer in a crewcut.
Julia had studied every detail of a certain photo. She estimated Tim’s age at around fifteen. The shot showed him as he approached Stoneham Cabin. He wore his father’s old naval flight jacket, still too big for him, though he had already gotten tall.
“Mount Airey?” the eleven-year-old Tim had asked.
She heard herself saying, “Yes. That should be fine. Check in with Mrs. Eder when you’re going. And tell her when you come back. Be sure to let me know if anything up there needs to be done.”
Her son left the room smiling. “What’s the big deal about that damned cabin?” her husband asked.
Julia shrugged. “
The Wasps of the Eastern United States
,” she said and they both laughed. The title of her grandfather’s tome was a joke between them. It referred to things no outsider could ever understand or would want to.
Julia returned to her list. She had memorized every detail of the photo of their son. He had tears in his eyes. The sight made her afraid for them all.
Her husband held out a page of notes. “Take a look. I’m extending an olive branch to Mrs. Roosevelt. Her husband and my dad disagreed.” He grinned. Franklin Roosevelt, patrician reformer and Timothy Macauley, machine politician, had famously loathed each other.
Julia stared at her husband’s handwriting. Whatever the words said would work. The third photo in the leather folder her grandmother had given her showed FDR’s widow on a platform with Robert. Julia recognized a victory night.
She could trace a kind of tale with the photos. She met her husband. He triumphed. Their son went for comfort to the Rex. A story was told. Or, as in
The Iliad
, part of one.
That day in the study in Georgetown, she looked at Robert Macauley, in the reading glasses he never wore publicly, and felt overwhelming tenderness. Julia could call up every detail of the photo of their meeting.
Only the boy in the background looked directly at the couple who stared into each other’s eyes. He smiled. His hand was raised. Something gold caught the sun. A ring? A tiny bow? Had Robert and she been hit with Eros’ arrow? All she knew was that the love she felt was very real.
How clever they were, the gods, to give mortals just enough of a glimpse of their workings to fascinate. But never to let them know everything.
That summer, her son went up Mount Airey alone. It bothered Julia as one more sign he was passing out of her control. “The gods won’t want to loose this one m’ lady,” Smalley had told her.
Over the next few years, Timothy entered puberty, went away to school, had secrets. His distance increased. When the family spent time at Joyous Garde, Tim would go to the Cabin often and report to her in privacy. Mundane matters like “Smalley says the back eaves need to be reshingled.” Or vast, disturbing ones like, “That jungle portal is impassable now. Smalley says soon ours will be the only one left.”
Then came a lovely day in late August 1954. Sun streamed through the windows of Joyous Garde, sailboats bounced on the water. In the ballroom, staff moved furniture. A distant phone rang. A reception was to be held that evening. Senator Macauley would be flying in from Buffalo that afternoon.
Julia’s secretary, her face frozen and wide-eyed, held out a telephone and couldn’t speak. Against all advice, trusting in the good fortune that had carried him so far, her husband had taken off in the face of a sudden Great Lakes storm. Thunder, lightning and hail had swept the region. Radio contact with Robert Macauley’s one-engine plane had been lost.
The crash site wasn’t found until late that night. The death wasn’t confirmed until the next morning. When Julia looked for him, Timothy was gone. The day was cloudy with a chill drizzle. She stood on the porch of Old Cottage a bit later when he returned. His eyes red. Dressed as he was in the photo.
As they fell into each others’ arms, Julia caught a glimpse that was gone in an instant. Her son, as in the photo she had studied so often, approached Stoneham Cabin. This time, she saw his grief turn to surprise and a look of stunned betrayal. Timothy didn’t notice.
The two hugged and sobbed in private sorrow before they turned toward Joyous Garde and the round of public mourning. As they did, he said, “You go up there from now on. I never want to go back.”
FINALE
Julia approached the grove and cabin on that first morning of fall. She was aware that it lay within her power to destroy this place. Julia had left a sealed letter to be shown to Timothy if she failed to return. Though she knew that was most unlikely to happen.
A young woman, casual in slacks and a blouse, stood on the porch. In one hand she held the silver mask. “I’m Linda Martin,” she said. “Here by the will of the gods.”
Julia recognized Linda as contemporary and smart. “An escaped slave?” she asked.
“In a modern sense, perhaps.” The other woman shrugged and smiled. “A slave of circumstances.”
“I’ve had what seem to be visions,” Julia said as she stepped onto the porch. “About my son and about this property.”
“Those are my daughter’s doing, I’m afraid. Sally is nine.” Linda was apologetic yet proud. “I’ve asked her not to. They aren’t prophecy. More like possibility.”
“They felt like a promise. And a threat.”
“Please forgive her. She has a major crush on your son. Knows everything he has done. Or might ever do. He was very disappointed last month when he was in pain and wanted to talk to the corporal. And found us.”
“Please forgive Tim. One’s first Rex makes a lasting impression.” Julia was surprised at how much she sounded like her grandmother.
The living room of Stoneham Cabin still smelled of pine. The scent reminded Julia of Alcier and her first visit. As before, a door opened where no door had been. She and Linda passed through an invisible veil and the light from the twelve portals mingled and blended in the Still Room.
“Sally, this is Julia Garde Macauley. Timothy’s mother.”
The child who sat beyond the flame was beautiful. She wore a blue tunic adorned with a silver boy riding a dolphin. She bowed slightly. “Hello, Mrs. Macauley. Please explain to Timothy that the Corporal knew what happened was Fate and not me.”
Julia remembered Smalley saying, “It’s a child will be my undoing.” She smiled and nodded.
Linda held out the mask, which found its way to Sally’s face.
“This is something I dreamed about your son.”
What Julia saw was outdoors and in winter. It was men mostly. White mostly. Solemn. Formally dressed. A funeral? No. A man in judicial robes held a book. He was older, but Julia recognized an ally of her husband’s, a young congressman from Oregon. This was the future.
“A future,” said the voice from behind the mask. Julia froze. The child was uncanny.
Another man, seen from behind, had his hand raised as he took the oath of office. An inauguration. Even with his back turned, she knew her son.
“And I’ve seen this. Like a nightmare.” Flames rose. The cabin and the grove burned.
“I don’t want that. This is our home.” She was a child and afraid.
Later, Linda and Julia sat across a table on the rear porch and sipped wine. The foliage below made Mirror Lake appear to be ringed with fire.
“It seems that the gods stood aside and let my husband die. Now they want Tim.”
“Even the gods can’t escape Destiny,” Linda said. “They struggle to change it by degrees.”
She looked deep into her glass. “I have Sally half the year. At the cusps of the four seasons. The rest of the time she is with the Great Mother. Once her abilities were understood, that was as good an arrangement as I could manage. Each time she’s changed a little more.”
Another mother who must share her child, Julia thought. We have much to talk about. How well the Immortals know how to bind us to their plans. She would always resent that. But she was too deeply involved not to comply. Foreknowledge was an addiction.
A voice sang, clear as mountain air. At first Julia thought the words were in English and that the song came from indoors. Then she realized the language was ancient Greek and that she heard it inside her head.
The song was about Persephone, carried off to the Underworld, about Ganymede abducted by Zeus. The voice had an impossible purity. Hypnotic, heartbreaking, it sang about Time flowing like a stream and children taken by the gods.
From the time “Files of the Time Rangers” was published, got some nice reviews, was on SFWA’s Nebula Awards short list for Best Novel. After this I went on to write stories about a speculative fiction author living in Greenwich Village, stories about gay Fairies, post-apocalyptic tales involving telepathy. I stopped thinking and writing about Time and the gods and thought it might be for good.
Though I was born there, I haven’t lived in Boston since I was eighteen. That was in 1962, over fifty years ago as I write this. But looking for material, I go back to the city and to those years I spent there. For me Boston in the mid-20th century feels like a legend, one only I remember and have to tell before it gets forgotten.
One day I was thinking of ways to tell the story of being a kid in South Boston circa 1950, living with my parents in the D Street Housing Project and going to St. Peter’s School. Suddenly the Fool of God came marching into the tale, bringing with him Heaven, Hell and the Singularity.
Writing about the Fool was amusing. In so many ways he sounds like me, reminds me of myself—maybe as I would have been if I hadn’t been able to escape the place of my birth and got recruited by one side or the other in the War Between Good and Evil.
A MEMBER OF THE WEDDING
OF HEAVEN AND HELL
T
he Fool of God, on a mission from Heaven, moved up the Timestream passing through portals from one world to the next. In the second century of the Caliphate of Mercy, a period others call the eighth century AD, he emerged from a portal in Alexandria, smiled the slack off-center smile that looked a bit half-witted, and batted the breeze with the crew as he sailed across the Mediterranean on a fast markab to a portal in Marseille that would carry him hundreds of years further Upstream.
Closing in on his destination, the Fool taxied across a St. Petersburg ruled by the mad Czarina Anastasia, sat in a sled wrapped in bearskin rugs as a six horse team bore him to a Buddhist monastery whose portal gave him passage to a world where the monastery buildings housed a station of the Great China Railway. He negotiated centuries and continents to reach a backwater of the Timestream and a certain world in which it was June 1960.
That date was a safe distance Downstream from both the Singularity and the Last Judgment. A wedding was scheduled for 11:30 on a Saturday that its planners had reason to know would be sunny. Late that morning, attendees assembled at the Church of the Holy Redeemer, a well-to-do suburban Roman Catholic parish in the Eastern United States for the marriage of Aiden Brown to Maria Quinn.
All would seem ordinary unless you were one who could see that the two ushers standing in front of the church in morning coats, starched white shirts, and ties with glittering studs, polished shoes and striped pants were minor demons in human form.
The demons’ names in this time and place were Bill and Bob. Both were over six feet and brawny but different enough so as not to be identical (which often attracts unnecessary attention). Bob was blond with the beginning of a receding hairline; Bill was darker, with a slightly bent nose.
An older couple, nicely dressed, parked a ’60 Pontiac Catalina sedan and approached. The man seemed slightly startled at the sight of the two; the woman just smiled and refused Bob’s offer of a helping hand on the church stairs.
When the couple was past, Bill murmured, “I’m starting to wonder when the big guns are going to show.”
A family group: mother, father and four kids ranging in age from a girl maybe six to a boy around twelve piled out of a Chevy Nomad station wagon. The others passed by with scarcely a glance. But the little girl stared at them wide-eyed.
When the family was up the stairs, Bill said, “They’re from the bride’s side is my guess. A few years up the Stream and that kid’s going to get recruited by the enemy or us. Nothing we do here is undercover. Hell versus Heaven’s a sporting event.”
Bob said, “One day they pull you forty years Downstream to this world with variations you never saw before and expect you to blend in like piss on a yellow rug.”
“And we do it and we don’t ask why,” said Bill.
“It’s the minor tweaks that get you,” Bob said, “the little things—that Denver 2020 where they drove on the left.”
“We lived to tell about it, which not everyone there got to do,” Bill reminded him.
A red Jaguar convertible pulled into the parking lot and a large figure with wide shoulders, sunglasses and a tuxedo got out.
“Oh, my. It’s the Defiler,” Bob muttered.
“Major reinforcement on the groom’s side,” said Bill.
The Defiler didn’t so much walk as roll, as if he were on treads to the passenger door. He opened it, bowed slightly, and gave his hand to a lovely dark-haired lady who looked to be in her early thirties. She wore a picture hat, stiletto heels, a little black dress, and a string of pearls.
“And here’s the Fiend!” said Bob. The two straightened up and stood, each with his hands clasped at the small of his back.
The couple came towards them with the Defiler on the woman’s left and about three paces behind, his face blank, a fighting machine on medium alert. The Fiend looked right at them.
“Door demons, at ease,” she murmured when she was a short distance away. “Anything?” she asked Bill.
“Civilians: eighty-four so far,” he said softly. “Theirs and ours. About even. The heavenly host—the bride and half a dozen bridesmaids—are inside.”
“We got a roof demon on top of the church. And woods demons covering . . .” Bob started to tell her.
Without breaking stride the Fiend looked around and for an instant flames brighter than the sun leaped up wherever she looked. They were on the grass, the walk, the front of the church, on the two door demons who now wore hairless green skin and glowing red eyes.
It lasted only a moment and all was as before, except there was just a hint of sulfur in the air. As the Fiend passed the two, she reached out, and faster than a human eye could follow, slipped her hand halfway into Bob’s chest and drew it back.
Guests approaching blinked at the flash of pyrotechnics. Their noses crinkled slightly at the smell. Most thought it was all their imaginations.
When the Fiend, the Defiler, and the wedding guests had gone up the steps, Bill said quietly, “If the Fiend wants to know, She asks.”
“She didn’t need to do that,” said Bob. His words were slurred. “She touched my heart and her hand is sharp and cold like an ice pick.”
“Sometimes I think you got called up by the wrong side,” Bill muttered. “You’re lucky she didn’t sic the Defiler on you.”
Inside, the organist warmed up by running through a fugue. A bridesmaid poked her head out the door and looked around like she expected someone.
“So far, nothing new from their side,” said Bill. “I don’t get it.”
The Great Fool was more or less in formal clothes when he got off the commuter train in a nearby town and hailed a taxi. He had the driver cruise slowly toward the Church of the Holy Redeemer.
Driving up in the cab, the Fool reached out mentally and scanned the assembly. He recognized the barely human outline of the Defiler, smiled the off center smile, and wondered once again where Satan got his reputation for subtlety. He found the Fiend, realized he recognized her, and frowned.
When the cab pulled up at the church, he was startled and fumbled for his money. The two ushers watched intently as he got out, stocky and kind of dumpy, looking like he hadn’t combed his hair. His morning coat seemed too big; the cummerbund was unbuttoned and the tie undone. One shoe was untied.
“Holy shit,” mumbled Bob, “this is even bigger than I thought!”
“Door demons!” said the Fool, “underlings of evil! Are your names still Nick and Nock?”
“Not locally,” said the Demon called Bill.
The Great Fool looked at Bob and asked, “Nothing to say to me Nicky? You talked a lot back in Denver 2020. And as usual so did I. We discussed my boss and your boss quite freely. You did a lot of screaming. Many souls got saved in Denver. Do you recall that?”
Bob tried to speak, but instead gulped. The Fool said, “I had to travel further Upstream after that. You both know the kinds of security they have in the mid Twenty-first century. One of the things I got asked before they’d let me on a plane was whether my teeth were all my own and I said, ‘Do you think I rent them? Of course they’re mine—some I grew, some I had installed at my own personal expense.’”
The Fool of God laughed as the demons started to edge back.
“Of course I could have said they were all just a gift from the Creator,” said the Fool. He smiled as he spoke, and his teeth flashed brighter than gold in the sunlight.
The two flinched, blinded, and the Fool, moving even faster than the Fiend, put his hands on Bill and Bob’s chests. He didn’t have to touch them to see their souls, but there was no sense in having that known.
He looked inside and saw the dark knots and bonds with which their hearts, brains and souls were bound to Lucifer.
In a twinkling he plucked a few strings and there was an image in the air of a ray of sunlight piercing dark clouds. Both of them staggered.
“Fine talking to you Chip and Dale,” said the Fool of God and slopped up the stairs with his untied shoe flapping.
The one called Bill looked more than a bit dazed. He said, “We need to tell Her,” and turned towards the church.
Bob stopped him. “If She wants to know, She’ll ask. Just like you said.”
*
Inside the door the waiting bridesmaid genuflected, rose, took the Fool’s arm and said, “My name is Anna.”
“An angel fair in maiden guise,” he said.
“You’re too kind, sir,” Anna replied.
A quick glance showed him the golden knots with which she was bound to the Creator. She was as far below the heavenly variety of angel as a school crossing guard is to the director of Interpol. But the heavenly hosts, the Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Dominations and the rest never stirred out of paradise. They found humans, endowed them with special abilities and sent them to do the work.
Like the Fool, Anna had been recruited from one of the thousands of worlds along the Stream. In the hierarchy to which they both belonged, the Fool thought of himself as a kind of street cop in the mold of various family members.
She led him to a side chapel where there waited what outwardly seemed an ordinary bridal party. The Fool, of course, saw wings and halos amid the flurry of activity as the bridesmaids worked to pull him together. And soon he stood laced, zipped, combed and with a fresh white carnation in his boutonnière.
All in white the bride Maria Quinn—Chief Guardian Angel of this part of this world—watched and said, “I’m honored that you’re here. I hope your presence means I have Heaven’s blessing.”
Silently for once, the Fool drew her aside, and glanced into her soul, caught her memories. She exhibited all the expected signs: a heavenly vision at a very young age, a call from above to become a divine recruit, a fast rise in the heavenly ranks to a supervisory position. To his surprise there was no evidence she’d been tampered with by satanic powers.
“I was called to the Gates of Heaven, which are all light and music and glory beyond envisioning,” he said. “That meant an assignment of great importance. I received instructions from beings of an order of grace one can hardly even imagine who told me to come here and see what this was all about—an angel marrying a slave of Satan. I broke all rules and records getting here.”
She said, “I insisted that the wedding be in the church. And Aiden agreed.”
“That’s the devil’s name?”
“Aiden Brown is his name. However it may seem to some, what we’re doing is our own idea. We love and understand each other. This is a backwater world. But here the representatives of Heaven and Hell go about their business a lot more openly than in any world I’ve seen or heard of.
“I love the work,” she said, “the occasional miracle, making things a bit easier for the poor and the oppressed for my having been here. During an exorcism I met Aiden who was there to take custody of a demon that had been expelled from the body of a child. Aiden was the enemy but he apologized for this having been done to a kid. The demon in question had gotten out of control.
“What he does isn’t that different from what I do. He tries to make things bearable for those in despair, cuts corners, brings a bit of color to their misery.”
The Fool thought of heresies and cults and of what happened to those, so sadly misguided, who formulated or joined them.
“Fairly quickly,” he said, “you got engaged to a representative of the Dark Powers in this boondocks. You’ve caused ripples up and down the Time Stream, all the way to Heaven and, I have reason to believe, Hell. I don’t think I have to explain to you why this has gotten attention.”
“I’d heard tales about the Fool of God,” she said, looking him right in the eye. “How you blunder through worlds seeming to talk to no point but always manage to have things come true and right at the end.
“We all know what happens a few generations up the Timestream—humanity disappears. What a few of us are doing here might be an answer to that. I’ll accept all the blame if I’m wrong. But I thought you might be more understanding.”
The Fool contemplated the amazing twists and turns that people used to justify their wrongful deeds. He thought of the ones similar to Maria Quinn that he’d encountered along the Time Lanes and how he’d never met one he didn’t like.
But the Fool also knew it was more than possible he’d have to crush her plans—and maybe her. He remembered his last teacher, an ancient operative of Heaven who lived in a stone house in the mountains on a world from which Satan was totally excluded. The Old Fool as he was known had often told him, “Sometimes we must do a little bad in order to do a great good.”
So he smiled and said, “Some people have an interior editor, a stern gentleman or a dour lady, who shuts them down at the first sign of thoughtlessness or indiscretion with the admonition, ‘Have a care, you thoughtless cad!’
“Mine’s a wispy little fellow who, when he says, ‘Don’t you think you might tone it down?’ gets told by me, ‘Stick it where the sun won’t shine you sniveling sodomite,’ and who then mumbles, ‘Very well, as you think best.’
“So you see there’s no point in taking me seriously,” said the Fool. He had become aware of something going on in the main church and excused himself from the chapel for a moment.
When he stepped out the door time stood almost still around him. The crowd in the church moved so slowly he had to look closely to see it happen. An elderly woman being helped up the aisle was almost stationary. A kid in velvet shorts bouncing up and down with excitement seemed suspended in air. It felt as if he was inside a bowl and his own movements seemed fast and fluid as a fish.
It’s known to all that Satan plays tricks with time. Reflecting on that, the Fool became huge and clad in chain mail. The sword he drew shone with a blinding white light as he turned to face the one figure in the church thatmoved as fast as he did.
With a small smile, the Fiend approached him. The fact she hadn’t brought that blunt object, the Defiler, let him understand they were under a flag of truce. He allowed his eyes to open wide in surprise and said, “Daina Zukor! It’s you who’s done all this?”
“Can it, O’Malley,” she replied, “and put away the sword and iron pants. You turned a couple of my demons silly on your way in and you knew I was here. I dropped the Lithuanian name when I signed up and left Southie. It’s now Diana and I’m Chief Fiend of this sector of the Timestream. I understand misdirection and confusion are your specialties, but we’re old friends and with me you can give them a rest.”