She listened for familiar sounds within the nightmare:
The radio, the bubble of the kettle, the hum of the refrigerator, sounds that could wrap her in a cocoon of normality, sounds that could breath and life back into the real world.
Sounds that denied the Salesman of God lying dead on her floor.
She felt sickness climbing in her throat, felt the bitter tang of it clawing to be free. Ashley closed her eyes but instead of blackness and escape there was a death called Lamenzo dancing where there should have been darkness and safety. She opened her eyes again, knowing what was waiting for her when she did, but still sickened by the spreading circle of blood.
She began to move, needed to.
Tremors chased along the muscles of her arms as Ashley crawled oh so slowly past the body of her would-be killer. The warmth of his blood making gloves for her hands as they walked through his death. And in that elastic moment she found herself vomiting, putting her hands up to her face and screaming as the blood sank in. She couldn’t move for the longest time and even when she could it was a slow, torturous struggle that took her face to within inches of his. She, the Moon and him the Earth, her orbit brought their lips into a lover’s proximity, hovered as if addicted to the gravity his body imposed on hers.
Then she was in the passageway, past Lamenzo’s body, and the spell such as it was, was broken. She felt wetness between her legs, spreading through her sweatpants, a dark wet stain around the join of her legs and down her thighs. “Oh, fuck...”
The phone was on a stand just inside the hall and mercifully out of sight of Lamenzo’s corpse. Pressing her back against the wall Ashley lifted the telephone into her lap. She didn’t know who to call, she knew Gabe had friends on the force, she could see a line-up of faces, but no names.
She sniffed. She had started to cry without realising it.
Outside she heard the sound of a car door slamming and young people laughing as they walked up the street towards the river.
“Pull yourself together, girl. You’re tough. You’re a survivor.” But she didn’t feel tough and she didn’t feel like a survivor. She felt like the victim of a hit and run. She felt like road kill.
Shivering, she plucked at the sweatpants where they clung to her thigh. The hallway, her hallway inside her home, suddenly felt cold and unfriendly.
She pressed out the numbers 911. The first bleat had scarcely sounded when a calm voice said: “Emergency Services. Which service do you require?”
“Help me,” she said, barely a whisper. Drawing her knees up to her chest she slipped into a kind of comfortable cradle and began rocking slightly, the phone still held to her mouth but her mouth unable to form the words she so desperately wanted to say as the shock settled in and began suffocating her.
“Are you still there, Miss?”
She tried to say yes. Nodded.
“Is there someone in the apartment with you?”
Again she tried to say yes; something came out but it wasn’t a word.
“Listen to me. Stay calm, if you can get out of the building, get out. Do not put yourself in danger. Understand.”
“His... his body... body’s in the kitchen.” she said finding the truth inside her somehow, giving voice to it. “I think he’s dead... I think... I think I killed him.”
From downstairs she heard the sound of the main door swinging closed and the security lock latching into place, followed by the slow measured sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Okay, sit tight. Don’t touch a thing. Don’t move a thing until we get an officer on the scene. Can you confirm One Eleven Prospect Parkway and I will dispatch paramedics and officer backup?”
“Yes.”
“And your name?”
“Oh God, I think I killed him.”
“Your name please, Miss?”
“Ashley. Ashley Powell.”
“Okay, Miss Powell, there are officers on their way. Don’t let anyone into or out of the building before they arrive.”
“All right,” she said, but the operator had already hung up.
She put the phone down and stood, looking around as if she were in some stranger’s house, as if everything around her belonged to someone else, some other woman who lived the kind of life that had room for pools of blood and dead bodies in the kitchen.
“Gabe,” she said, needing to talk to him, to hear his voice say everything was going to be all right. Starting to shake again she looked at the small black bottle of Sandman sandwiched between the three bottles of malt and rye on the bookcase. She thought about going back into the kitchen for a glass but there was his body on the floor and all that blood. So much blood. No, she decided, no glass.
She unscrewed the cap and raised the bottle to her lips.
As she swallowed the short hairs on the nape of her neck bristled beneath the electricity of instinct’s caress. She felt him in her throat even as she looked around frantically for the knife she’d left in the kitchen, left imbedded in him.
Behind her, a wet, shuffling sound like dragging feet, and then something else, another sound. Raw. Wet. Meat being torn. Brittle cracks. Bones being pulled back on themselves and broken.
“Just answer me this one question, bitch. Do you want to live?”
Turning her head, too late to run, she saw too much. The Angel within Lamenzo’s body was shedding its borrowed skin, peeling back the dead flesh. Opening its secret anatomy with claws, touching the corruption of the child killer’s corpse, parting the clotted muscle and slowly bleeding death onto the carpet as, layer by layer, the angel peeled away a miracle. A cage of white bone beneath the flesh, and then like some grotesque butterfly the angel began the screaming agony of its rebirth, coming out from the skin, breaking the white cage bone by bone, taking Lamenzo off just as easily he would a suit of light. It stepped out of the corpse, leaving the carapace of skin and bone in a bloody wet puddle around its ankles. A sheen of blood clung with lover’s intimacy to the angel’s true form, blood that ran a wash of red through its hating eyes.
Ashley backed up a step, already dead without the motors of her heart and lungs realising the redundancy of beating.
The angel stepped forward a step, reaching out, a curious almost childlike gesture as if it needed help taking its first few faltering steps. It was drawing agonized gasps, as if being born again had truly hurt it. Then it was moving with more certainty; a purpose. Claws that should have been fingers pushed into her, gripped her, and pulled her close so that the sting of the angel’s over sweet breath brought tears to her eyes.
“Do you want to live?”
She thought of Gabriel then, in that fraction of a second as a sharp stabbing pain flowered in her kidneys. The Angel’s claws opened her skin, parted the striated layers of muscle and tendon in search of the ultimate prize; her heart. And then her legs were folding, balance betrayed by the intimacy of death.
“Do you want to live?” It asked again, tasting her delicious fear. Tasting the bitter tang of hope in her heart, the fluttering of love for the Amerind. He waited out her screams, waiting for the answer he knew memories and love would bring to his ears. Of course she wanted to live.
Her screams faded as her face kissed the softness of the carpet. She pushed her hands beneath her, struggled to rise but weakness, cool like the elixir of nevermore, flowed through her veins and she slumped back to the floor... the carpet smelled stale, of burned out cigarettes and blood.
“Yes,” she said, or tried to say as the life leaked out of her, I want to live. I want to live... Sorry, Gabriel, I’m so sorry... I’m so sorry...