“Get out of my head,” Gabriel begged, clutching at his temples in an attempt to drive the demons out of his skull.
He was staggering down the sidewalk like a drunk, stumbling into things, a woman sluicing down the steps of her tenement block with a hose, a Popeye-like man overloaded with one litre Coke bottles on his way to the recycling bins, a three-legged dog and one of the war veterans on his board panhandling outside a downtown music store. They just pushed him away, sent him staggering further down the street no different from any other drunk or crazy. No one stopped to help him, but why would they? All they saw was a lunatic clutching at his temples, almost pulling his hair out and babbling about voices inside his head.
On the corner of Cicero, Gabriel feel to his knees, driven down by the sheer assault of voices, personalities opening themselves up to him. Battered on every side by the hopes and dreams of Manhattan as they coiled about him, blanketed him with a terrible, bleak desperation that smothered him. He didn’t have the strength to shut them out, all of their pains and petty thoughts drowning his own personality beneath their crude waves of passion. The maelstrom of emotions threatened to overwhelm him completely if he couldn’t throw up some form of defence against the consciousness of everyone around him. Barricade his soul from all of the hatred humming in the air. Barricade it from the underworld of appetite and hunger that made the real one turn.
The assault was so fierce he barely noticed the rest of the world, the solid, tangible world, as it passed by the corner of his dilated eye. Gabriel groped out, looking for something to support him as he struggled to stand again. His hand closed on a restless coil of shifting light. The thing was like some huge snake… no, an umbilical cord, stretching impossibly back to the earth mother. His head span with wonderment whilst his eyes feasted on the snake of life in his hands, awed, hungry, and afraid as to why the miracles were coming apart.
The pains of Manhattan were nothing next to the hatred spiralling inside Gabriel. It was as if a red mist had smothered his eyes. The world was coming undone and the hatred blazing inside him was just one small way in which the nuts and bolts of humanity were loosening. He cast about desperately looking for something to vent that hatred on, something to batter until the agony in his fists was loud enough to silence the voices crying out in his head. Something to punch, to hit, to kick, with all of the anger, all of the hate, that was knotted up inside him until it bled out of him. Until it dripped red on the sidewalk. Until it hardened like rust on the walls. Until it seeped into the very fabric of the city itself…
The auras of people treading the drab, grey streets where the snow had melted to slush held firm for the moment, but for how much longer? How long would it take for all of those hatreds to seep into the streets and the buildings? How much longer would it take to have fissures cracking through the skyscrapers, red mouths opening in the sides of Wall Street and Broadway with sharp-edged teeth ready to eat –
Gabriel shook his head, trying to force the alien thoughts out and somehow reign down on the tidal swell of emotions churning around inside him. “The madness will pass,” he whispered, framing Ashley’s face in his Mind’s Eye. If he could only shut it out, or isolate it, he would be okay. In response:
“Look upward, my little Hiawatha…” the angel within, mocked.
Across the street, back where it all began, where Gabriel had stumbled onto a miracle in the guise of a child killer being gunned down by New York’s finest, towered the brooding edifice of St. Malachi’s.
“I hate you.”
The church’s maudlin spire drew his traitorous eyes. It was like gazing upon a finely cut chalice and seeing his own reflection manufactured a thousand thousand times in its cuts and angles, and in each reflection his eyes were accusing, the darkness within them whispering his fear.
“I’ve killed you once,” he breathed aloud, trying to mask his own voice clamouring inside his mind, the one obsessed with the truth: “I’m scared… I don’t want to die…”
“Oh, have you? I don’t feel very dead…”
Gabriel made it as far as the white line cutting through the road before the relentless waves of hatred coming off the old church stopped him in his tracks. They were physical. As physical as any gale. Strong enough to drive him back a staggered step.
“Frightened of me?” he hissed between clenched teeth, pushing him on even as the skin stretched taut across his cheeks and the muscles in his face began to twitch and vibrate, coming alive like maggots beneath the thin reality of his flesh. With each step it felt as if his eyes would rupture and ooze blind jelly, the winds of hate like a knife delivering one lethal wound after another. And then, suddenly, the knives were real. The huge stained glass windows beneath the spire shattered outwards as if mere glass couldn’t contain all of the hatred that was bottled up within those four walls. Splinters of multi-coloured glass sprayed out across the street, cutting into him. Gabriel turned his face away from the ragged glass as it rained down on him. Each splinter and shard biting where it fell.
When Gabriel looked back, a film of red glass had sealed the wound in St. Malachi’s facade. He walked through the litter of broken glass that lay ignored and glittering on the floor, his gaze raised to the fire blazing redly where the cross should have been.
The vaulted roof and the stretching spire of blood red glass caught the darkness of the sun and the night together and threw it back at the sky. A glass tower coruscating against a scarlet sky. A magnificent red beacon to all of the evils mankind's twisted minds could imagine.
“How do you kill an angel?”
Inside the heart of the church somewhere, a crack, like timbers breaking.
The corpse of a woman came staggering through the bronze doors of the nave, smoke chasing after her. Her thick winter coat crackled and burned, the sparks igniting her long dark hair even as she swatted at her head trying to beat the flames out. Gabriel couldn’t move; tried to tell himself she was dead already. That there was nothing he could do. She opened her mouth to scream but no sounds made it out of the mess that was her throat. Wisps of smoke curled around her lips. Lingered on her teeth as if they wanted one last kiss, one last nibble before the said goodbye.
It took Gabriel a moment to realise there were no flames burning away in the building behind her and understand that it was the intimate glass skin that hugged her body like cellophane that had ignited, that it was the very hate of the woman herself that consumed her. That she truly burned with hatred.
She fell to her knees, flame-wreathed arms beating ineffectually at her sides as the fire ate her once-pretty face, her hands like fiery batons conducting her own death until she pitched forward. Her husk lay smouldering on the sidewalk until it had burned out. Even with the flames gone, the stench of charred flesh clung to the air with its taint.
Gabriel stood there, mesmerised by the human torch, the angel’s last taunting question ringing in his ears…
How do you kill an angel?