In His Image: Beholden
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In which Cathy Randolph is not mistaken about what she sees - probably.
Cathy Randolph, Gabriel.
Cathy Randolph had never considered herself a particularly interesting woman.
She had never considered herself much at all. Oh, sure, there were consider-yourself-first advertisements everywhere these days. Sometimes her eyes ran over the self-help section in Borders with a kind of voyeuristic fascination: How To Be Happier: A Teach Yourself Guide; Become The Perfect Flapper; God Wants You Happy: A Spiritual Guide to Divine Contentment, with a photo of an ordinary grey pebble on the front; An Eight-Step Program for Learning to Like Your Looks, covered with pictures of supermodels; a self-help book on learning to live without relying on self-help books; a six-hundred-page tome on dealing with attention deficit disorder. But they all belonged to another world, of perfect bodies and choices and selfishness, and white sofas that never stained. Other people had Lifestyles. She had always been too busy to indulge in that sort of dream, if hedonism was a dream. There had been her father to care for as he died, then her two little sisters, who had both grown up until they didn’t need her anymore. And then there had been Bill, and his closely guarded liquor cabinet, and his long, empty absences, and the hospital stays, and his furious sudden outbursts against their neighbours which had left her quietly patching things up and baking far too many batches of apology muffins.
She had only ever said exactly what they expected her to say, so nobody remembered her. She hadn’t had time to develop opinions of her own.
After Bill had died, there was plenty of money but not much to do with it. She travelled a little, just to see her sisters, and decided she rather liked it; but with no one to see to and no one to demand she could not think of where to go when she left her hotel room. It was difficult to know precisely why she should get out of bed at such and such an hour, or why she should eat a small meal in the morning and a larger one at night rather than the other way around.
Her younger sister decided she was too quiet, blamed it on the trauma, and handed her a pamphlet for victim support sessions, with “Your Struggle to Escape Domestic Violence Is Heroic” emblazoned across it in energetic yellow. So she rang and joined.
She was a little surprised to realise, after a few months, that she almost had an opinion about it. She wasn’t particularly enjoying it. They were supportive. They talked about her terror and her crushed spirit, and how she was rescuing herself. They encouraged her to be the commander of her nightmare. They told her again and again that she was strong, while they fluttered their hands and spoke softly and told her without saying anything that she was fragile, that she felt wronged and broken.
If she didn’t know what she felt, she began to wonder, why did they know?
Why should they decide?
Cathy Randolph was, in fact, becoming tired of being told what she she felt. What she had seen. (It may not have been the Incredible Hulk, but it had looked more like Lou Ferrigno than any bear she’d ever seen. She knew bears. She had chased black bears out of the smokehouse weekly with a broom in her teens.) She knew that there was plenty in the world that she didn’t know. Plenty she couldn’t explain. Perhaps that made her ignorant - everyone else seemed so sure they knew everything these days.
Or perhaps it didn’t.
One day, she drove past one of so many flashing billboards telling her to be or discover Who She Really Was by purchasing the right bra. It niggled at the back of her mind all evening, for no good reason, until she realised, with a startling feeling of freshness, that she did not know what she was, so she concluded that she was blank. An empty page, that she could write on.
It felt right.
Three weeks later she realised that she was in a class for victims and decided that, even if she didn’t know what she was, she knew one thing she was not, and walked out of the circle.
She took up horse-riding instead.
And bit by bit, question by question, she began to build herself a new Cathy Randolph.
Ann rang after a while, to ask why she had dropped out, sympathy vibrating over the phone.
“I didn’t want it.”
“Wasn’t it helping?”
“They’re all nice people.”
The TV murmured melodramatically in the background.
“You have to rebuild your hopes and dreams, Cathy. Domestic violence can extinguish them. Sometimes it’s alright to ask for help.”
There was a town on the TV. There had been two more in the last five minutes. One had been devastated by a vicious hailstorm that had suddenly turned to fire. In another, a thick black cloud had settled low over the town, smoky tendrils curling down into the streets, and about half the population had suddenly turned wild and cold, smashing windows and walls, killing others and (finally) themselves. In the third, an explosion of white light at the very centre of the city had killed everyone downtown, and burned out the eyes and the hearing of everyone else within two miles. For the first they said global warming; for the second a new strain of swine flu; for the third, terrorists. She stared at the television, losing track of Ann’s voice. All three dead towns looked the same to her. The same abandoned cars and bodies on perfect front lawns. The same wide, dull eyes of the survivors, as reporters jabbered at them about what a shock it must be, losing your town and house and family in a freak accident, and what did they think when they first saw the flames? the smoke? the explosion?
And there had been five other towns yesterday.
“… You mustn’t be shy about asking for help every step of the way, Cathy. I read a website that said your fear is probably still immobilising you. You have to be strong, Cathy. Cathy?”
“Sorry, Ann.”
Pause, sigh.
“Believe me, Cathy. You need it. It will help, if you give it the chance.”
Believe me.
Believe that the signs the experts pointed to meant what they said they meant and nothing more nor less. The barely recognisable traces of some kind of flu in the corpse of one of the killers in the second town, and the other bodies were so badly damaged we couldn’t confirm that they weren’t infected. The sheer force of the explosion and the peculiar side effects - nothing any of our scientists could recognise, so (logically) it must have been foreign science. Foreigners. Therefore, extremist Muslims. See only the clever web of evidence they strung together from a few strands and flung like a cloak over the whole mess.
“But what if I see something you don’t?” she thought of saying, but she didn’t because Ann would not want to see.
For a moment she thought she saw - no, she saw the eyes of one of the reporters interviewing victims turn black, all black, before flickering back to pale hazel. Even though it was impossible, she saw it.
She let Ann talk herself out, neither agreed or disagreed, thanked her and hung up.
She thought about the black eyes for a moment, then went into the kitchen to finish the sweet potato quiche she had started earlier. She decided that was important enough, for now.
---
She dreamed that night.
It was a familiar dream, lately: an empty hotel room, quite pleasant. She would sit there on the bed with her hands between her knees, or sometimes on the chair at the little grey wooden desk in one corner. Sometimes she had a shower in the tidy white and green bathroom, or stood by the window looking out, although she could never have said at what. There was always a slight movement of the air in the room, a gentle sighing back and forth that stirred warm and cotton-soft against her skin.
She liked this dream. It was peaceful. Nothing much happened in it.
There were things of hers in this room. Her blue skirt and a pair of familiar old shoes in the wardrobe. Her hairbrush and her reading glasses on the shelf above the bed. Three little carved wooden angels that a friend of her father had made for her when she was six. The wing of one of them had broken off long ago, but he still looked serene. Every time she dreamed this dream there were a few more things of hers in it. Today, there was a pen made of blue glass that Bill had given her in apology for some fit of temper and some bruise that had faded after a few weeks, and an old exercise book like the ones she had used to fill with precisely correct accounts of her holidays or the Civil War in school.
And, after a while, there was a man.
This was new.
He just appeared, sprawled on the bed like he’d tripped and tried to make it look deliberate, wearing a shirt that was too big for him and mismatching socks without shoes. So she studied him, curious. He wasn’t something of hers, but he did look faintly familiar. Or, she decided, he felt faintly familiar, because she was close to certain that she had never actually seen him before. His eyes were tired and honey-hazel, and he flickered like the picture on a television whose plug wasn’t quite firm in the socket, but there was something in the curl of his lips that suggested they defaulted to a smirk.
“Cathy Randolph. Got a minute?”
His voice sounded, she decided, like someone had dressed a tiger in velvet - muscle and weight and wildness cloaked in decadence. But he hadn’t even the substance to make the bedspread dip under him.
“I’m only sleeping. Who are you?”
“Oh, just some guy, you know.” He grimaced, then grinned, deliberately distracting. “Nice dream you’ve got here. It’s been months since I dropped in on any that didn’t involve Lucifer and the Apocalypse. Gets a bit depressing after a while.”
She found herself a little surprised to observe the fine hairs on his forearm, the corded muscles there, and the way they bunched when he twisted one hand in the sheets, shoulder tensing with discomfort while the other hand waved airily (and stiffly) in demonstration before flopping back down. This was a curious level of detail, for a dream.
“You don’t belong here,” she observed mildly.
He flickered, sheepishly.
“See, here’s the thing. There’s this whole big… thing going on out there, and I thought I was out of it but apparently I’m not, and someone I know patched me up a bit and stuck me way up in Canada. And I’m - sort of weak right now, and stranded, and can’t do anything for myself - except this, apparently, and who knew? - but I can’t find the dreamer I need, and I stumbled on your dream sort of accidentally and knew you just enough to get in, and, well, long and short of it is I kind of need you to make a call for me.”
He flopped back on the pillows, semi-translucent, staring at her with hopeful self-deprecation from underneath an artfully drifting forelock, and she was too old and far too married to fall for that kind of charm, even in a dream. And this didn’t really feel like a dream.
She checked surreptitiously to make sure that this wasn’t one of those ones where she was inexplicably naked.
“Do you make a habit of visiting people’s dreams, then?”
His fingers twitched, as if he was one of those people who always talked with their hands but he just couldn’t get up the energy to lift them. His voice was a little too light and casual. “I wouldn’t say habit. Been keeping out some nasty nightmares for a friend these last few months, but I haven’t actually dropped by. I like my face not punched in.” He grinned. “I’m not actually stalking you, if that helps.”
So, if she was dreaming, she was dreaming about strange men who wore mis-matching socks and no boots in Canadian weather (didn’t they have permasnow up there?), and said they could manipulate dreams. Not her usual thing. She was pretty sure her subconscious mind wasn’t that obscure.
“You can’t make the call yourself?”
He grimaced. “I’ve kind of… fallen off the grid.”
And, yes, he was trying too hard, definitely too suave by half, like he was braced for rejection or hysterics. But his eyelids kept slumping downwards as if weighed with sand, and his hands and feet were almost transparent, and he looked so tired and only half-there, in a way that, oddly, reminded Cathy of her youngest sister, when she was thirteen and running a high fever, and her eyes had kept sliding away to something beyond the room, as if the real world was too much effort to cling to.
She rose, and moved over sit on the edge of the bed. His eyes flickered wider, pale and startled clean of cynicism for a moment, searching her face as if waiting for the punch line.
“So you want me to call this friend of yours? The one whose dreams you can’t get into anymore?”
He blinked, and his eyes slid away. “Not him, no. It’s not that kind of a call.”
She waited.
He shifted nervously.
Apparently he had less staying power than a six-year-old girl.
He snapped his faint fingers, and a fainter Chupa Chup appeared between them. He glared at it disconsolately. “So, you probably already think I’m mad.”
She folded her hands in her lap. For some reason, she was enjoying this. It felt known, and easy, and soothing, in a way that talking to a strange man in a hotel room in a dream really really shouldn’t. Some paradoxical combination of the familiarity of being needed and the freedom of talking to a stranger, the security of her dream room and the refreshing honesty of not having to pretend that the world worked the way everyone always said and neither more nor less.
She felt her mouth curling into a smile that she had forgotten she knew how to make. “Passing judgement on people I meet in my dreams would be a little hypocritical, don’t you think?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her quizzically. “Well, there’s that. Also, I’m - not very used to being honest. Sort of made a career of the opposite, actually.”
“Tell me.”
He sighed the heavy, hissing sigh of one resigning himself to the inevitable, dropped his head back onto the pillows to stare at the ceiling, and sucked the ghostly lollipop into his mouth. “Okay, here’s the thing. You might have noticed the news has been a bit crazy lately. Rains of fire, way too many animal attacks in broad daylight in the middle of busy cities, ghost towns, unaccountable explosions, minor plagues, that kind of thing. Little stuff.”
She nodded, as he paused to run his tongue around the Chupa Chup, then stared at it mournfully.
“The thing is - someone let Lucifer out.” He addressed himself to the ephemeral sticky red thing in his hand, and talked quickly, as if expecting interruption. “Yes, the devil’s real, he’s just sort of been locked away for most of human history, so he hasn’t been up to much beyond a bit of whispering and delegating. But he’s really out now, and his lot are sort of running wild across most of the country. Demons, Cathy. And a few other nasties.” The lollipop vanished as he darted a furtive glance at her. “Not just America either. Not that you’d know that from America’s journalists.”
She considered this. It was impossible, of course, but that was no argument nowadays. She thought of the reporter’s black eyes, and of the fire springing from drenched earth although the meteorologists had said the clouds had been all wrong for lightning.
And the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt.
She thought of the cartoon-perfect Hulk-shaped hole around her front door. The plasterer had laughed, and talked about teenage pranks.
“Alright.”
He looked up from his determined examination of his fingernails, eyes narrowed. “Alright?”
She shrugged. “It makes sense.”
He stared at her a moment, until his eyes softened into kind of curiosity, head bobbed to one side like a hawk, as if he had only just noticed she was actually there. Many people never noticed, of course, so she didn’t mind if a dream hallucination took a little time because he was too busy with his own thoughts. “You’re a strange solemn one, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “My little sister says it’s terrorists. It looks like more than that to me.”
He laughed, a brief startled bark from a hoarse throat. “Oh, honey. Terrorists care whether you live or die. These guys just think you’re handy ammo.” He paused, mouth twisting oddly, as her stomach clenched. Then, suddenly practical: “I need you to put in a call to the other side. To pray.”
Something jumped inside her, unsettling and cold, and she looked away to stare at the abstract colours outside the window. “You mean -” the prayers of one woman could ever make a difference? God exists in this dream, so concrete and deliberate that you could compare prayer to a cell phone? I could ever - “You think God will hear me?”
“Sweet Gytha Ogg, no, don’t pray to him. Anyone might hear you. No, to an angel. Just one. Name of Castiel.” She felt him push himself up onto one elbow next to her, felt his eyes on her face. “Can you remember that?”
“Castiel. Why?” How? Our Father who art in - no, that wouldn’t work. Our Castiel, who art - Angel Castiel, please listen to - why didn’t the Bible provide a handy style guide for prayers to angels? She blinked herself back into familiar practicality, and turned back to the strange man on her bed. “Who should I say wants him?”
His gaze skittered away from hers. “Trust me, we really don’t want any of the others turning up.” He took a breath, as if considering his words carefully, eyes fixed on her cupboard. “Tell him I got over the whole Elysian Fields thing, but I - I’m going to need a little grace before I’m back in the game.” He leaned forward, solemn and briefly sincere. “Word for word, Cathy. He’ll know who it is.”
She nodded. “Got over Elysian Fields, need some time before you’re back in the game.”
“Grace, not time.”
“Grace. And I pray to - Castiel.”
“That’s it.”
An angel. An actual angel. She stared at the crumpled bedspread by her hip. Apparently her dreams were deeply strange. She was almost sure that praying to individual angels would never have occurred to her waking mind.
Not that she had done much praying lately. And when she had, she hadn’t really thought of anyone… hearing it. That was rather a stretch of the imagination, wasn’t it? imagining the - being - receiving it, imagining them thinking about it and responding? Wasn’t it rather presumptuous?
Well, thoughts were free. Questions were powerful.
A hand, which looked like it should be brown and warm and strong if it had had colour and weight, crept into her vision. It hesitated for a moment, then moved to cover hers, which was pressed more tightly than she had realised into the faux-antique brocade counterpane.
Softly, “Gotta ask, Cathy. Why a hotel? Something special happen here?”
His skin was reassuringly rough and real, for a translucent hand.
And there was something in that - in the touch, in the question, in the faint uncertainty wavering beneath the casual tone - something gentle, and it almost undid her. When was the last time someone had taken care for her feelings?
“No.” She blinked it away, and trailed her finger along the frame of the window ledge. It was rough to the touch, and faintly dusty. “I just like it.”
The soft breadth of his thumb pressed against her palm, human and solid. “Why’s that?”
She frowned absently at the grey fuzz on her fingertip, and thought of Miriam, travelling month by month from hotel to hotel, eating at a different place every night (and she was hopeless at choosing places that cooked food she liked), busy and successful and hating it.
“My sister once told me that she feels stifled in hotel rooms. Submerged. Because they’re all the same, and they’re all white and bare, and there’s nothing of hers in them at all.” She took a breath, stole a look at his face, pallid and curious and casually handsome on the pillow. “I like them. I like that they start empty. You fill them up with all the little things you bring with you and you say, I am here.” She touched the little wooden angel on the windowsill. “You can see them all so clearly in here. The little pieces of your life.”
His eyes vanished for a moment under the curtain of sandy eyelashes, then reappeared, fixed on her, dark and distant and the colour of solidified honey, the steadiest thing about him. There was something guarded in there, and something fierce like envy. “And what do you do with them then? Once you can see them?”
She laughed, and felt for no good reason as if the sun had come out. “Does it matter? Brush your hair.” She picked up the brush and tossed it to him. “Or your teeth, I suppose. Or…” She looked over at the desk, at its new pen, and the exercise book waiting for her thoughts, now that she was free again to have some of her own. “Or write.”
He released her hand and picked up the brush from where it had fallen on his thighs, eyeing it like a security guard might eye an abandoned bag in an airport, so casual that it was almost threatening. “And how do you know what to write?”
She shook her head, still smiling, and reached out to touch his shoulder. It flickered out of reach for a moment, then back again, warmer under her fingers than it should have been. He looked up at her hand, wary and strangely distant.
“You don’t,” she murmured to the defensive hunch of the muscle under her hand. “Isn’t that sort of the point of being human? You make it up.”
He went quite still. Under her gaze, his eyes froze over into something alien; under her hand, his shoulder turned to rock.
His mouth stayed mobile enough to twist into something nasty, but he looked away before it did that.
So she asked, for the third time. “Who are you?”
His profile was Grecian, like marble and satire. “That, my friend, is the sixty-four dollar question.”
She rose from the bed and turned to the desk. It was probably older than she was, but it hadn’t seen half of what she had.
She picked up her pen, and pressed it into his hand. “If I’m calling an angel on your behalf, I think I should know. Even if you are only some strange dream thing my brain has thrown out.”
He stared at her, then at his own fingers curling around the pen. He huffed, impatient and off his balance. “I don’t know, okay? I just - don’t know.”
“Will I see this angel?”
His gaze slid away, away from the shy hope hidden behind her voice. “He might drop by. Or he might just come straight to me. I’m not exactly very well hidden right now. And he knows how to find me, once he knows I’m - about.”
He flickered into nothingness.
Well, it couldn’t hurt to try. She knew of no one who’d come by harm through praying.
---
The next night, his face looked like a pool after someone had thrown a rock into it, grey and broken and stormy.
“You must have paraphrased.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t. Castiel, got over Elysian Fields, need some grace before you join the fight again.”
He turned away, shoulders tight and hard as the black crag of rocks beyond him that were lashed by the rain of the worst storm she remembered. At least he was on his feet tonight, even if she could see the shadow of the storm clouds through his clenched fists.
No rain fell where they were, but the waves crashed on the sand, and the whales that she had seen that morning on the television rolled in the waves, and raised their tails to the sky, drove themselves along by blind magnetic instinct on old migratory routes that were archaic centuries ago, and beached themselves in the deadly shallows.
She stepped forward after him, compelled to speak, to comfort. She felt the cool press of wet sand between her toes with the vivid clarity of some dreams. “I’ve prayed all my life, and no angel ever came.”
His laugh was like a growl. “No. No angel.” He swallowed. “Sorry, kid, but it’s not the same.” He stopped, knee-deep in breakers, staring out at the agonised rolling flank of the humpback whale in the surf before him. “Imagine… imagine you rang your little sister and told her you were hurt and bleeding in a ditch somewhere and you couldn’t walk and had no money on you and you were hungry and cold and thirsty and didn’t know what to do.” The deep rumble of the waves rose behind his voice, angry and cold. “And she hung up on you.”
He looked away, glowered at a distant crag as if he ought to be able to melt it into the sea with the power of his furious eyebrows, then the water scurried from about his feet and he stalked away to the place where the ebbing waves melted into the sand. She looked at the hard set of his shoulders and found herself reminded of the caramel tarts she had made that afternoon. They had always been Miriam’s favourites, when she was a teenager, after a day at school had gone to hell. Cathy thought of them until one appeared in her hand. She stood and moved over to where he was glaring at the water that whispered tentatively at the soles of his mysteriously sandless socks, and held it out to him. He looked up, startled, looked at it, looked at her. Then his mouth twisted into something wry and bitter.
“Imagining things out of the air. Must be nice.”
“It’s my dream. I think I can do what I like in it. Hope you have a sweet tooth.”
He stared at her, then at the tart, narrowly, as if he expected it to pipe up ‘April Fool!’
It didn’t. He bit it, warily. “Thank you.”
She stood beside him and let him eat, listening to his breathing settle down beneath the grumbling of the sky. If one of her sisters had hung up on her - she didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine it.
Beside her, he brushed the shortcrust crumbs from his fingers, and watched them fall onto the sand as if they were the most fascinating thing in his life. It wasn’t just disappointment in an unanswered prayer. It was betrayal, and denial, and disbelief.
She could relate.
She tucked one arm through his. “Do you speak to angels often?”
His voice rumbled, deep and ironic against her shoulder. “Used to. Not so much, these days.”
“What are they like?”
“Honestly? Boring. No sense of fun. Show them a poker deck and they put their head on one side and look at you like you’re a beetle they’d hoped was a bottle of vodka.” His tone was derisive, but there was something tender in his eyes, though they were fixed on the distance. “Not that they’d know what to do with vodka either.”
She smiled, ironic - her loved ones had not been so ignorant - and reached down to lace his fingers through hers. He let her do it, and even squeezed her hand. His was as warm as it had been in the hotel room the night before, not so cold as you’d expect on an ocean beach with a stiff wind. They stood together for long minutes, watching the rolling waves and the stranding whales, who were vast and beautiful but who had no other thoughts than to follow what they’d known for thousands of years, and who were dying for it.
After maybe an hour, or maybe a minute, he asked her how she was doing without Bill.
It seemed perfectly natural that he should know about that.
She considered the question. “It’s hard.” She considered it a little more. “Easier than with him.”
A mother whale sang, long and high and piteous, as her calf pushed its way up onto the beach, far beyond where her weight and girth and failing strength could reach. It would have to die alone.
She looked at the strange being beside her.
“I prayed for him to die once, you know.”
His eyes darkened - not in mood but in colour. It made him look curiously richer. Like a dessert that you didn’t know was heavy with brandy until it melted on your tongue. “Yes. I know.”
“And die he did.” She paused, and he waited, stiff and steady. “I guess I’m beholden to someone for that.”
He huffed a little breath of startled air, almost amused, looked away at the sky for a moment, then back at her, incredulous. “Beholden? Seriously?”
“Yes. It’s an old word I read once. It means - to be obliged to someone. Or, to be watched over, or sustained, to keep you from falling.”
“Yes.” He looked at her curiously, sideways, a hint of depth and a hint of sweetness. “Don’t hear it much these days.”
She smiled back, honest and open. If she could not be true in her dreams, after all, there was nowhere else. “I like it. It sounds... wondrous.” She softened her voice, though it would be barely audible above the surf. “‘Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy’. Being held. Treasured.”
There was something soft and surprised about his mouth, and then a little twist of humour. “Makes you think of Gabriel, does it?”
“Gabriel?”
“Tipping off the shepherds about the Messiah.”
“Oh, no - Gabriel was the one that told Mary. I think it only says ‘an angel of the Lord’ for the shepherds.”
He smirked at her - an honest, broad smirk. “So it does.”
She found herself smiling back, almost grinning, conspiratorial as she’d never been with anyone, before she realised. “Wait. Are they real? All of them?”
“Cathy Randolph, for shame. Aren’t you a good Christian?”
She gave him a level look. “I have faith. That doesn’t mean I take everything literally, without question. Some things can be true without being real.”
His eyes danced. “Alright then. Richard III was real. And a nasty piece of work. That doesn’t mean you should believe everything Shakespeare says about him.” He paused. “Or the Richard III society either, come to that. Seriously. Google them. Humans are nutters sometimes.”
He said it with a sort of fondness, and a sort of exasperation, but there was something dark and frustrated in the way his eyes were fixed on the breakers.
She thought of devastated streets from one side of the country to another, of one young man without eyes who hadn’t been able to believe his new wife was dead because he couldn’t see her corpse, and of Ann’s voice over the phone, determined that victim counselling would solve everything.
These guys just think you’re handy ammo.
“What you’re doing. Or…” she hesitated, looking sideways at the sudden stillness of his jaw. “What you’re meant to be doing. Will it help?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. As if in reply to the keening of the stranded whales, a massive head loomed through the breakers. A bull, larger than was surely possible in real life, pushing himself high up the beach with long, powerful sweeps of his tail, his own thoughtless strength driving him to his death. The man watched him from under lowered eyelashes, hands shoved deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched.
Finally: “Well, the good news is, Heaven and Hell both think I’m dead.”
The bull writhed, his fins gouging deep ravines in the sand, suffocating under his own weight, his muscles useless out of his watery element.
“The bad news? Stuck like this, they might as well be right.” He shrugged, and kicked at the sand with the foot that wore a red sock. “Looks like they don’t want me.”
There was a plaintive note under the last few words that she was sure he hadn’t meant her to hear, so she carefully didn’t.
“You know, I’ve… thought that I was useless. Sometimes.” Her voice sounded inadequate. She thought of the months after her father’s death, her days formless without the rhythm of nursing. “I think it’s just about… finding a different use for yourself. Finding something you can do, and doing it.” She shrugged, and added, lamely, “It’s better than doing nothing, even if it seems pointless for a while.”
He didn’t answer.
Standing in the sand, watching whales die, offering a shoulder to someone who felt abandoned by both sides of a celestial war, or possibly by his friends, wasn’t the strangest dream she’d ever had. Even if it was some kind of metaphor.
It was a little dispiriting, though.
“I thought angels were...” She trailed off, thinking of stained-glass images full of colour and light, faces lifted in fierce adoration and song, faces looking down the length of a bright sword in stern righteousness, certain and sure and beautiful. “Joyous.”
He chuckled, harsh and short. “So did I, once. Long ago.” He tipped back his head to stare at the sky, clouds roiling slowly in bank upon bank of dark celestial mountains. When he spoke again, slow and cold, his voice sounded a little like they looked. “Let them keep their Apocalypse.”
She found herself shivering, in a way that disconcerted her. She hadn’t really noticed the weather before, but now the rain was falling on her, harsh and hard and chill. It fell right through him, running into his open eyes and sliding down his cheeks before losing its place on the tenuous reality of his body and dropping through to the sand below. He never blinked it away.
After a few minutes, as the rain soaked through to her skin and the dying giant groaned, he closed his eyes, then looked at her, smirking faintly. “Well, Cathy Randolph, I am beholden to you.”
She laughed a little at the wording, but there was an odd formality under it that sounded almost sincere.
He turned to walk away along the beach, then paused and glanced back at her, eyes shaded. “So. Being human. You make it up, right?”
“So I hear.”
He tilted his head, quizzical, maybe a little hopeful, maybe even concerned. He looked small and rather alone against the vast sky and dark, hunched rocks. “That working for you?”
She thought of Ann and Miriam and their own lives, of her kitchen and the recipe for meringues she had been gathering courage to try, of her own offer to Sarah at the horse club to keep her horse for her on Bill’s old property until Sarah’s finances recovered. Of something that might be the Apocalypse, and of teaching herself to use Bill’s shotgun.
“Yes. Yes, I think it is.”
---
The next day, she googled the Richard III society. They were nutters.
It was something to think about.
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