The man who had once been the boy who sang sweetly and heard angels, but who no longer sang, and tended, these days, to take his lead from a voice belonging to someone he called the Messenger, watched the woman as she stood on the chancel floor just below the sanctuary, regarding the high altar and her handiwork. She nodded, apparently satisfied that she had set all in readiness: the chalice – front center – properly vested, gospel book and missal on their stands. Two feet before her, forming a semicircle on the wood floor, pumpkins, squashes and gourds, all painstakingly polished for the Thanksgiving Eve service, after which, the man supposed, they would become offerings for the food bank detailed on the noticeboard outside.
St Luke’s Episcopal Church on Burgess Road in North Foster. Rural territory, the road dark, the only light around coming from the church itself. A somewhat desolate spot, no sign anywhere close by of the preparations for feasting that had surely to be going on in homes all over. There should, he’d thought earlier, watching from inside the truck, be nice little houses close by, lights aglow, families getting set for the holiday, turkeys resting inside dark refrigerators, relatives in distant places packing overnight bags before their journeys; or perhaps they’d already arrived and were sipping hot toddies or eggnog …
Here and now, inside the church, the lights at the sanctuary end were ablaze, bulbs and shades dusted, wood reasonably close to gleaming; but most of the nave was unlit, and he was seated on a pew beside the north wall, shrouded in semidarkness.
Very still. All but invisible.
He stared up, briefly, at the altar, then let his gaze travel around the whole interior, over the two stained-glass windows, their design scarcely discernible without sun or moon or electric light to show them off. He thought, for a few moments, of other intricate windows from his past, of choral music, of the glow that had once filled him.
And had been stolen from him. Together with his life.
Not that he’d been exactly ‘right’ even back then.
‘OK,’ he said, inside his head. ‘Speak.’
The Messenger spoke.
It was hard for him to be sure sometimes who was the obedient one: he or the Messenger. Both so different now, not at all the way they’d started out. He had believed in the Angel then with all his heart and soul, but he knew now that even back at the start of it the commanding voice had been in his head, part of his condition. And once he’d accepted that, it had become a matter of realizing that he could – at least some of the time – turn it on and off at will. Tricks he’d taught himself. Tricks no doctor or shrink would sanction, let alone condone.
Free will.
His will.
In the Bible, angels were messengers among other things, and the ancient Greek angelos meant messenger, depending on where you looked it up, and he’d appreciated learning that, felt that was good enough for him.
The Messenger was speaking now.
He closed his eyes, felt his heart contract, felt heat fill him, and then he cooled and his breathing slowed almost to a standstill, to nothingness, and he could concentrate entirely on listening – it was impossible to do anything but listen, because the voice filled his head, filled all of him, velvety gentle but galvanizing at the same time.
Commanding him.
She was kneeling.
An innocent, probably good woman, a godly person, most likely a member of the altar guild. A lay person, harmless—
‘Not harmless,’ the Messenger corrected him. ‘Neither good nor innocent.’
And the man who had once been the boy who heard angels understood that it was neither a messenger nor an angel telling him these things, that they were simply the truth. For he knew who and what had stolen his life from him; and all through his hideous afterlife, his purgatorial existence, he had been keeping those truths carefully stored, locked inside the miniature sacristy in his brain, to be released only at special moments.
Released now.
Enabling him to see this woman for what she truly represented.
Hypocrisy. Cruelty. Wickedness.
One of his visions filled him, a terrible visualization of those things, a logjam of absolute inner ugliness, threatening to suffocate him. And with that came the need – and the Messenger was here to help him, urging him on, commanding him.
To emerge from the shadows, make himself known to her.
Do what he had to do.
What needed to be done.
By him.
Now.