The scratching at the window could not be heard above the storm that rattled its casements and the teeth of the solid door in the thickness of its stone mouth. It was a thin bony clawing that sounded like a long-dead branch fallen in the wind. The storms that came up and across that coast were famous in their intensity. As were their infamous echoes that came out of the Vorrh. Freak climatic conditions produced by the enormous area of transpiration, and the broken mountain that rose up through it, took the approaching sea storm that had grumbled inland and spun it around its own vortex, often sending it flying back into the panting sea. Those storms, which passed over Essenwald, shook the city to its core, causing spiralling winds that grabbed at roofs and picked up anything loose to toss into the ragged sky. Sometimes the spires of the cathedral shivered in St. Elmo’s fire, which spurted jagged sparks from one to the other. No one dared to enter its interior at such a time. Ball lightning would form and prowl the aisle and naves, frightening sheltering images of Christianity into reclusive shadow. The storm would finally wear itself out mid-ocean, where it collapsed in unwitnessed cold rain.
Carmella and Modesta had not been outside their home in three days. Nor had anybody else in the desolate village. They feared for their lives, exposed to such a tumult. This storm was outside the circle of seasonal rains and too fierce for the few remaining villages to attempt to collect precious water in their wells and cisterns. When it cleared, the sun peered through a yellow sky, shutters opened onto a wet morn where vast puddles blinked with the last few drops of rain.
Carmella opened the bolted, sodden door, putting her weight behind its swollen resistance. The air smelt good and she walked into the rising temperature, leaving the house open to air. Every scent of the earth was rising, the olfactory kaleidoscope rippling in the primal reptile brain. Strongest from her animals in the inner courtyard, which were also vocal in their joy of the fresh day. Modesta was still sleeping as Carmella circumnavigated her property. Rare optimism warmed her muscles as she stood and saw the solidity of her portion of the world. The rest of the village could be heard peeling open, encouraging the warmth and the perfume of the sea to enter their stuffy rooms. She completed her cycle and returned to her door, stepped in, and gave an involuntary shriek.
Such an adolescent reaction should have been beyond her years of experience. All the dealings with the dead and dying. All the intercourse with the other world and its denizens of strangeness. What had stopped her in her tracks and made her cry was something different, something out of time or meaning. A different kind of impossibility.
“It will come to lead you,” the voices had said, “you must follow the seraphim’s chosen pathway without question or hesitation. Its silence and presence will guide your way to paradise.”
The voice had shaken Carmella’s trembling bedroom while she had lain prostrate before its majesty and the piebald Modesta had stood erect, smiling, her eyes gleaming with joy.
“Wait for the seraphim, prepare for its coming. We will never speak to you again.”
And every day Carmella looked along the winding track that led to her house and every night kept an eye on the dark door, while Modesta looked firmly into the depth of the blue sky, even at night in the black window of stars.
It should have been a child who asked the old woman what a seraphim was, but Modesta was no longer that. She should have the earthly body of a child, but it had tautened into a sinewy womanhood. The mind and soul that seethed inside her lithe patchwork skin was of an age and perception that was beyond comprehension. Most of Carmella’s questions were ignored or answered with a curt “You already know,” so it was a shock when Modesta held forth in her answer to the old woman’s simple question.
“The seraphim are a legion. Only one will come for us, a single seraph from the first dawn. We will know it by its otherness. It will have wings and hands to pray and to cover its face.”
And again Carmella turned towards the door. Nothing was there, but both of them knew that it was already flying to be with them.
Folding and unfolding in and out of visibility on her kitchen table was a creature that she had no reference for. True that some part of it resembled a bat or a bird that had been broken in half by the storm. But its animations seemed to come from light itself, flickering between black and dazzling silver, almost as if it still carried the pulse of the storm in its stencilled ligaments. A haze of shimmering blue flicked in and out of all its thin parts. Carmella approached cautiously, picking up a sturdy broom in the process, ready to beat it and shovel it off her table and out of her house.
“The seraph…” hissed Modesta from the darkness of her room, her pale speckled body standing in the doorway. “It’s the seraph.”
The old woman drew closer to the table and looked at the mangled slithering thing that was gently steaming as it tried to right itself and aim its pointed head at its audience, which now stood side by side, waiting. It opened its beak-like mouth and let out a blue light that dented and chipped the room and their ears with a sound like a cold chisel attacking a solid block of glass. They covered their ears until it ceased. Then Modesta raised her hand flatly above her head and made a circular motion while sinking to her knees. She tugged at Carmella’s dress, urging her to do the same. They both knelt, now with their heads below the level of the table. The seraph hitched itself to the edge of the scrubbed plateau and pushed its beak and eyes over the brink, staring down at the women. It made a softer mewing screech and they both bowed farther. After a few moments it closed its eyes and appeared to be sleeping. The women shuffled backwards to the far side of the room, where they watched it and whispered.
“Are you sure it is the seraph?” asked Carmella nervously.
“Of course it is, look at it. It was foretold. What else could it be?”
Carmella was still doubtful but packed her travelling things anyway and stacked them by the door. She then made food for their departure.
The seraph sprang awake and fell from the table, spilling outside through the doorway and onto the track, where it made its gristly noise and jerked forward, without any care about who was following. Modesta was after it in moments, calling to Carmella to follow. But slowed by the lopsided weight of the bundles and bags that she had roped about her, Carmella quickly lost sight of the piebald girl and the angelic emissary. She hastily pulled the gate shut and latched the heavy iron padlock.
“Come, come, we are leaving the village,” cried Modesta at the end of one of the blank lanes. All three were united again in a narrow fenced pasture.
“This is wrong,” said the old woman, adjusting one of the bundles that had slid around her body, making her look vastly pregnant. “This is Horacio’s land.”
The seraph ignored her and flutter-leaped like a spastic hen across the carefully organized rows of vegetables. Modesta picked her footing warily behind it. Carmella looked for another way.
“Where is it taking us?” she implored.
Suddenly there was a clumsy commotion as the creature became entwined in a string of netting connected to small cowbells, empty tin cans, and shards of broken mirrors. The jangling array made the seraph squawk as it slid through the dancing strings. The door of the nearby house flew open and an ancient man fell out shouting, a long-barrelled shotgun in his shaking hands. He did not even look to see who the intruders where. He just rushed and fired as he lurched forward. The recoil sent him spinning and corkscrewing like a child’s top, leaving him sprawled and groaning in a pile of scattered melons. The shot had been wild and nobody was hit.
“Quickly, leave!” barked Carmella, and all three departed the defiled garden.
It became clear that the instruction to follow the celestial herald was not to be taken literally. After the incident with Horacio it led them in a series of half circles back and forth around the perimeter of the village. It must be the general direction that should be followed. This was decided when they were eventually making progress towards the sea and the coastal track. With each footfall Carmella doubted the ability of their guide and the virtue of its supposed origin.
By late afternoon they had started the slow gradient of the winding cliff path, often having to stop and wait while the seraph flapped up and down, fell and skidded off the steep sides, or scrabbled outside of the range of human visibility. Its shrill voice would often be the only sign they had about which of the many dividing tracks they had to take. The light was fading fast and they were getting higher, the sea wind buffeting their nimble footsteps on the narrow ridge.
“We should stop soon and get off the track so that we might find a place to rest for the night,” said Carmella.
“But we are almost at the highest point,” said Modesta. “We can stop and sleep on the other side.”
The seraph, as if in response, squawked and tumbled sideways, looking like the wind was tossing a matted ball of sticks.
“See. He is pointing towards the inner path, the one to the left, it must be shorter.” And with that Modesta scrambled up the loose pebble path, which looked like little more than a goat track in the dying light. Forty minutes later a luminescence was coming off the land to meet the depth of blue in the twilight sky. The sun had been gone fifteen minutes and its last echoes were clinging to the edge of every surface. They were near the top and capable of looking straight down to the crashing sea and the slender worm of the lower path that inched below. The guide had vanished again and the child was holding her hands out in front of her in a crouching low wander, a movement that looked like a cross between tightrope walking and blindman’s bluff.
“We should stop now,” said Carmella, looking down at the child, who seemed to be where the track turned downwards. The seraph flew up above the child, calling impatiently, so Carmella stepped forward, expecting a gradual progressive slope, but it was a steep step and she stumbled down sideways into it, the weight of all her bundles swinging to one side of her faltering body.
“Seraph,” she beseeched as the combined inert momentum unbalanced her and twisted her sideways off of the path and crashing down the cliff. She clawed and screamed at every rock and shrub on the way, trying to dig her heels into every ridge and crevice. She knew in her panic that there was only one chance. If she could catch hold of the lower path, she would fall no farther. As she skidded and tumbled and her skin was ripped from her hands, she saw its thin line of hope rising towards her. She hit it shoulder first and it splintered her collarbone and broke her arm. Then as she screamed and tried to stop, the weight of the falling bundles was moving faster than she was and they sent her cartwheeling over the edge into the roaring darkness of the sea in the granite wadi below.