(no subject)
Crowley sleeps well enough on the plane; the flight is long, and first class is quiet, and almost empty. There aren't so many people coming out this way at the moment. He refuses the complimentary newspapers. He's seen too much of that headline. That's sort of the point.
The air, when he disembarks to a hazy sunrise, doesn't much bother him. Of course, by all accounts, the recent breeze has helped, but he suspects that even before, it wouldn't have held much of a candle to driving in a burning Bentley. No pun intended.
(He can almost pretend it's the smell of October bonfires, and not 1666, or 64.)
He goes to a particular furniture centre first, where the young man behind the counter is only too curiously willing to heft out the deliveries book and give him a certain address.
Nobody answers the door, but that's never stopped a demon when he's feeling nosy; when he finds the room on the other side empty, he shrugs, and waits. He sits on the cleanest surface there, which is the bed, and finishes his second mediocre airport novel, and contemplates the water and smoke stains on the ceiling, and draws spirals in the dust and grime on the windowpane.
When the sun sets again, he lets himself out, and goes to see what he can see. But there's no whiff, anywhere he goes, of a different sort of fire in the air, and no prickling down the back of his neck when he drifts through landscapes made of sad and hollow downtown diners. He ducks into one for a cup of watery coffee to go, and drinks it leaning against the wall outside, looking up at the bizarrely frivolous palm-trees silhouetted against the glow of street-lights, and across at the ugly buildings facing him.
It's with a jolt that he realises that the one in the middle - just another low, concrete building with a faded pastel exterior - is a church, and that there are people inside, singing their Sunday devotions.
On a hunch, a sudden unshakeable and ridiculous conviction, he waits again.
But Mass lets out, and people stream away to the parking lot, shake hands and then sound their horns at each other when cars back up around the exit, and that's that.
Crowley tosses his coffee, and keeps walking.
He watches sunrise from a bench above the city, then counts out the time difference on his wristwatch before finding a payphone.
---
"No."
"I don't think he's here anymore."
"I don't know. I suppose."
---
He buys three more unremarkable murder mysteries at Los Angeles International, and reads them all on the flight home.
The air, when he disembarks to a hazy sunrise, doesn't much bother him. Of course, by all accounts, the recent breeze has helped, but he suspects that even before, it wouldn't have held much of a candle to driving in a burning Bentley. No pun intended.
(He can almost pretend it's the smell of October bonfires, and not 1666, or 64.)
He goes to a particular furniture centre first, where the young man behind the counter is only too curiously willing to heft out the deliveries book and give him a certain address.
Nobody answers the door, but that's never stopped a demon when he's feeling nosy; when he finds the room on the other side empty, he shrugs, and waits. He sits on the cleanest surface there, which is the bed, and finishes his second mediocre airport novel, and contemplates the water and smoke stains on the ceiling, and draws spirals in the dust and grime on the windowpane.
When the sun sets again, he lets himself out, and goes to see what he can see. But there's no whiff, anywhere he goes, of a different sort of fire in the air, and no prickling down the back of his neck when he drifts through landscapes made of sad and hollow downtown diners. He ducks into one for a cup of watery coffee to go, and drinks it leaning against the wall outside, looking up at the bizarrely frivolous palm-trees silhouetted against the glow of street-lights, and across at the ugly buildings facing him.
It's with a jolt that he realises that the one in the middle - just another low, concrete building with a faded pastel exterior - is a church, and that there are people inside, singing their Sunday devotions.
On a hunch, a sudden unshakeable and ridiculous conviction, he waits again.
But Mass lets out, and people stream away to the parking lot, shake hands and then sound their horns at each other when cars back up around the exit, and that's that.
Crowley tosses his coffee, and keeps walking.
He watches sunrise from a bench above the city, then counts out the time difference on his wristwatch before finding a payphone.
---
"No."
"I don't think he's here anymore."
"I don't know. I suppose."
---
He buys three more unremarkable murder mysteries at Los Angeles International, and reads them all on the flight home.