Ashley stood on the watershed of the gently gabled roof, a ghost framed by the too bright streetlights and the tired moon. She could have been an angel but for the blue-black bruises around her eyes and the strangulation wounds around her neck. She looked as if she’d been beaten or hadn’t slept in days. Her hair dripped water into her eyes. She stood there, a dead girl crying rain as she held her hands out to him.
“Help me, Gabriel,” she said. The wind played with her soaked skirt, pressing the thin floral print material up against her legs, building an illusion as it flowed around her. She looked helpless… innocent in a way she never had…
Gabriel picked at his chest, seeking some kind of reassurance from the wise bird, but the tattooed raven was real and it told him one thing: eyes lie.
Still, he couldn’t find the words in him to deny the hope that somehow it could be her.
Worm Pipe, the thought was in his head but he didn’t know if it was his own… So many years ago Wind Runner had sat him on his knee before the campfire and woven the legend of Worm Pipe, the husband who, so much in love with his new bride that he couldn’t let her die, travelled to the Ghost Lodge in the Land of Dead Souls and begged for her life from his ancestors ghosts. He brought her back… But that was just a story… There was no Ghost Lodge… No Sky River… No Earth Mother… They were all stories, just like Napi, the First Father…
“Ash,” Gabriel breathed, trying to grasp the truth somewhere from within the need to believe the miracle standing before him. “I thought… I thought.” He thought he had seen her die, through her own eyes and then, twisted about, through the eyes of her killer, but how could he say that?
Ashley made an uncertain step towards him.
She had something in her hand. It took him a moment to realise what it was: a wilted rose. It was as if she had reached out and slammed her fist, dead flower and all, into his gut. He staggered back beneath the weight of the vision of another girl with a rose —
A sad faced girl alone in a street corner bar, drinking her day away. Between her fingers she twirled a flawed rose. Delicate white petals flaunting their imperfection; a single red tear weeping through the silk weave. There was something desperate in the way her long, sculptured fingernails pinched the fake stem. Her gaze drifted out of the window, to the lamppost across the wide street, some ghost of her past leaning against it, watching her.
Through the lens she looked less an angel, more a dead dreamer only anchored to this earth by the weight of her thoughts.
— Gabriel had put flowers on her grave the day he’d visited Sam.
He shook his head. “No,” it was barely a word. A denial. He was reaching inside his jacket for the snub-nosed .38, not caring that it wasn’t loaded with silver bullets, that he had no prayer for the dying angel. It felt heavy in his hand, but not heavy enough. How heavy should a life be? Heavier than a gun, surely. Heavier than the bullet that kills. “You’re not Ashley…” was all he said as he levelled the pistol’s hungry black eye on the body of his love.
He couldn’t hold his aim. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. Holding a gun on the woman he loved. His finger tightened around the trigger but the gun refused to hold still, to keep its aim.
He heard her laughing inside his head and was sure that he had finally slipped into the mouth of madness.
Her eyes are empty, he told himself, her eyes are empty… It’s not her, not my Ash…
Gabriel wanted to believe he saw a flicker of Ashley in those eyes, but whilst she might have spoken with Ashley’s voice, the difference was in her eyes. Ashley was gone. Still, he wanted it to be Ashley as he brought the .38 back up to lock eyes with his dead lover. Wanted her to understand, to know what it cost to pull the trigger.
“I won’t forget to put roses on your grave,” he whispered, closing his eyes as he squeezed the trigger. He couldn’t bear to see.
The sound of the gunshot was deafening.
And after it, for a long second, there was only the sound of the rain drumming on the old church’s roof.
Rain.
And inside:
Pain.