The Angel of Red stared at the twisting spire of St. Malachi’s as it rose up before her stolen feet. A great stone monster obsessed with the Immaculate Conception. Her nostrils flared, scenting the last of the witnesses on the wind. Back where it all began. The smile on her face spoke of the ecstasy shuddering through her body, each tremor a new, sheer delight, as phantom bullets slammed into her. She gasped her pleasure, as near to pure undiluted and erotically charged sex as this body had ever felt, reliving the death dance of Carlos Lamenzo not twenty feet from where she stood now.
A drunk sat huddled between the lines of graves, the synapses of his addled mind singing with the lies of the unholy communion blood wrapped protectively in his brown paper bag.
“Welcome to my world,” she crooned, laughing at the drunk as he struggled to stand. Her world was gradually filming over with a patina of red glass supple enough for each stem of grass to ripple with the caress of the choked inner city breeze. The failing light left the stars looking like dew-drops spattered on velvet and the old church like the little plastic castle at the bottom of a goldfish bowl. Around her the bushes and trees took on the haunting aspect of crucified scarecrows as the skin of red enveloped them, making each trunk, each branch into another skeletal limb. All around the churchyard branches sparkled against the halo of the twilight sun, catching and reflecting the whole spectrum of colours yet somehow radiating a pure blazing red strong enough to fill the whole city with its hate.
The church was all angles and pillars, windows pointing like accusing fingers at the darkening sky. The dressed stone had greyed with exhaust fumes and the tragedy of everyday life but still St. Malachi’s looked magnificent in its gothic splendour. Every angle so precise, roses carved into the body of the pillars, florets and coronets atop them. Two hundred and eighty feet to the stone cross capping the bellower and still St. Malachi’s was an anachronism dwarfed by skyscrapers of glass and steel that stretched five times her height. Out of place and out of time.
The Angel of Red smiled herself a hateful smile, captivated by the work of God, amused that it lay so utterly bereft of life; a playground of junkies, drunks and whores. She walked slowly, still adjusting to the quirks of her borrowed body, and placed her hands out flat on the cold stone as if feeling for a pulse. The old stones were as dead as their deity.
A shiver of pleasure shuddered through Ashley Powell’s body, the physical memory of a bullet bursting through Carlos Lamenzo’s spinal cord. Beneath her hands a film of resinous red glass melted over the stone. She lifted her hand higher. The sticky glass began to flow up the wall, trying to reach her fingers. Smiling, the angel began a slow spiderclimb up the face of the old church, one hand at a time, the glass film working like glue to hold her slight weight as she ventured higher. Every foot gained drew the veil of red glass higher until it began to obscure the beauty of the old religion with the malice of the new.
Manhattan spread out beneath her eyes, grey and labyrinthine like so many twists and turns of the laboratory maze, all leading back to St. Malachi’s. Did they know this when they built the old church? That it bisected all angles of the city so equilaterally? The streets could have been brightly coloured ribbons where neon signs and car headlights joined with the secret underlife of colours. Her fingers dug through the safety of the glass film into the hardness of the wall, flaking stone.
Where to look? Where was her little Indian boy?
The Angel of Red’s nostrils flared, trying to catch Gabriel Rush’s scent on the swirling winds. He was out there… close…
A flurry of wind gusted around her, curling around the church’s conical spire, plucking at her clothes like a demanding child as she scuttled upwards, reaching for the small stone cross that marked the summit. With all the irony of an angelic rodeo rider, the glass angel straddled the cross as if it was some beast waiting to be tamed. From its perch up on the cross the mesh of multi-coloured lines dissecting the city might have been some kind of intricate electrical diagram, wires and earths connecting each and every home and life down there. But the angel knew them for what they were, the lullaby of life, harmony and tranquillity, hatred and vengeance, sung by the streets on a failing winter night.
The angel closed her eyes, savouring the moment, the snatches of the song of life, even as she sensed him. The one white light in the city. The one light that shone brighter than the rest. She didn’t need to open her eyes to see him. Gabriel Rush was this one dazzling white nimbus cutting through the falling night like a blade cleaving through Manhattan's idiot heart.
The angel licked a dry tongue across Ashley’s sandpaper lips, following the gossamer strands of light with its eyes, tracing them from the sea of souls all the way back to the doors of St. Malachi’s.
“Come to me, beauty.” She crooned in her stolen voice.