As Above

There was never anything good in the newspaper.  It was a local affair, written by and for Linden natives, and thus rarely reported anything of interest to those members of the town who did not possess the gene for gossip.  Keely Kenzie read it primarily out of habit at this point; the curl of disgust that rose like smoke in her breast at the sight of the myopic headlines had become a solid part of her routine.  She did not read the stories, only scanned the front page then flipped immediately to the obituaries.  Linden being a relatively small town, and Keely having grown up in it, she recognized most of the names and ticked her way down the columns as she had her morning coffee, penciling in causes of death next to each name.  Those that she did not know, she left blank.  Lee would fill them in for her later.  He had been a cop in Linden for nearly twenty years and was privy to information that even Keely’s nosiest neighbors did not know.

It was morbid, she knew.  Lee told her often enough, feet propped up in her lap as he ate his breakfast and she drained cup after cup of coffee.  She couldn’t seem to stop, though; it had become as much a part of her life as brushing her teeth and taking the dog for a walk.  Briefly, once, she had entertained the thought of therapy and had rejected it just as quickly.  There were things that she would not say to anyone, not even her husband, and the thought of paying a stranger to drag those secrets to light did not particularly appeal to her.

“I’m off,” Lee murmured, hurrying past her chair.  Their quiet morning had been shattered once again by the blare of Gail’s alarm clock.  Keely made a soft noise of affirmation as she wrote “cancer” next to Rosa West’s name.  After a moment, she added a comma and appended “pancreatic” to the notation.  Lee’s car keys jingled as he darted past again and she tipped her head back.  He dropped a quick kiss on her mouth and then was out the door, off to another day of responding to domestics and busting the occasional teenager with beer or weed.

What an exciting life we live, Keely thought wryly, folding the paper and standing to gather the dishes.  Might as well let the kids sleep in a little.  They’d come home late last night looking troubled.  Gail in particular seemed to have had a hard time of it, and though they staunchly refused to unburden themselves, Keely recalled her own youth and had surmised that Gail and Paloma had argued over something.  Knowing that Gail was just starting to wade into the prickly maze of adolescence, Keely had allowed her to slouch up to her room after dinner without questioning her too strenuously.

She carried Lee’s breakfast things into the kitchen and dumped them in the sink before pouring herself another cup of coffee.  She had time to whip up some waffles and there were fresh strawberries in the fridge.  That ought to cheer Gail up a little, and Nolan was at the age where any food was wonderful food.  She bent to dig for ingredients as the bathroom door slammed upstairs.  By the count of three, she could hear Nolan whining at the door before giving up and stomping into the bathroom attached to the master bedroom.  Her children were just as predictable as she was now, a thought which brought her great comfort.

Humming to herself, she turned to fetch the waffle maker from the cabinet above the sink and shouted in surprise, her hand spasming.  Coffee spilled across the counter, filling the kitchen with its scent.  “That’s hardly any way to say hello,” he said, quiet as always.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.  Above her, the pipes gurgled.  Gail was in the shower.  Nolan would be pretending to use the bathroom while he read comics.  She was safe for a while longer.

“I told you I would come back, didn’t I?” he asked, stepping into the kitchen.  He looked the same as he had the last time she saw him, liquid brown eyes, dark hair, the hint of a five o’clock shadow.  He was handsome in an unassuming sort of way, casually rumpled and always smiling with the very corner of his full mouth.  It had been nearly thirty years now.  She could have gone another thirty and it still would have been too soon.

“I didn’t think you were serious,” she said, turning her back on him.  She sopped the coffee up with a towel, wondering if he could hear her heart hammering in her chest, wondering if he would even know what that meant if he could.  Did the heartless understand anything about the inner workings of the living?

“I rarely joke,” he said.  “Keely, we must talk.”

“No,” she said flatly.  “I’m done talking to you.  All of you.  You ruined my life.”

“You have a perfectly good life,” he said patiently.  The truth of his words stabbed at her and she hated him for it.  If only she had ended up in the gutter, addicted to heroin, selling her body, no use to herself much less to him.  Such spiteful thoughts…

“Seems that way,” she acknowledged.  “But you don’t know.”  Tears pricked the corners of her eyes, hovering on her eyelashes.  How many times had she prayed for him to come back?  How many times had her heart leaped when she saw a dark-haired man out of the corner of her eye?  It had all faded with age, the hurt becoming less and less, the bitterness taking root inside her until she had almost convinced herself that she hated him.  The sound of him, though, that rich, low voice that caressed each word like it was a song, and the smell of him, sweet and warm…

“You don’t know,” she repeated, flinging the towel into the sink.  She would not look at him.  He didn’t deserve that.

“I do,” he said simply, and she knew that it was true and she hated him all the more for it.

“Fuck off,” she said, low and throaty.  “I’m not helping you.  I let you make a murderer out of me once, I won’t do it again.”  There was a long pause, punctuated by the soft rustling sound that she had come to associate with him.

“Then we will find another,” he said.  His voice was tinged with regret, loss, and she made her heart hard against it.  “Your daughter has inherited your gifts.”  He did not say it in a threatening manner, but she took it that way, rounding on him with fire in her eyes.

“You stay away from my little girl,” she snarled.

“Or what?” he said, raising an eyebrow.  His voice did not change in pitch or volume, but there was a power to it now, power that she had heard only once before.  It clanged like brass in his throat, turned the blood to ice in her veins.  “You would do well to remember to whom you are speaking, Keely Kenzie.  I allow you much license because of the services you have rendered us, but I will not be commanded by you.”

Keely wanted to apologize, wanted to quell that terrible voice.  There was a time when she would have wept and begged his forgiveness.  Not now.  Before, she had been a girl.  Now, she was a woman and a mother.  “You can’t have my baby,” she said.  “Not Gail.”

“Gail is already a part of this,” he said.  “She has seen.”

A sob bubbled up in her throat before she could stop it, and Keely pressed her hand to her mouth.  “Seen what?” she murmured.  Gail had been so quiet last night, so troubled.  How could she have been such an idiot?

“I will be back, Keely,” he said.  His fingers met her cheek, smooth and warm.  “Consider well where your priorities lie.  You helped us once before and you may yet help again.”

“Gabriel…”  She dashed away the tears that wet her cheeks and stood straighter, but he was leaving already, his back to her, his shadow spreading far beyond the bounds of his body.

“The child must not be born, Keely,” he said, and he was gone and she sank to the floor, her head in her hands, sobs wracking her body.  Ten minutes later, her children found her there, wet-faced but determined.

Neither of them went to school that day.  Instead, they took a walk down the tracks.

She had known since she was small that there were things in the world that no one could explain to her satisfaction.  Feelings, fleeting glimpses of the otherworldly, had haunted her, ethereal fingers of the unknown wrapping gently around her life until finally rendering her functionally immobile.  It was the opinion of the doctors that she had suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown triggered by some childhood trauma.  She went to therapy sessions where she told the doctor – in that breathy voice that inspired such confidence in the legions of the medical profession – exactly what he expected to hear.  They gave her medication which she assiduously flushed down the toilet and they declared her on the mend and they had sent her back to her mother’s house, shut up for these many years.

It was just on the border of the forest, a battered little cottage with memories infused in the walls and floors.  She had painted each doorframe red, had planted rosemary all around the front stoop, trained vines up the walls, hung curtains in every window with a different color for each room.  It was her home now, quiet and sheltered, and she spent much of her time perched on a rocker on the porch, sipping coffee and staring out into the forest as she waited patiently for a sign of her purpose.

It came in the form of a flash of light one evening, deep among the trees.  She had been humming softly to herself as the cat twined around her ankles when it happened, a brightness that travelled through the trees like a shock wave, buffeting their trunks, driving animals before it.  She had dropped the coffee cup, heard it shatter just before the light reached her, washed over her.  It blew her hair back, breathed like a gentle wind across her skin; for a moment, the world was filled with an indefinable scent, sweet and warm and so ancient that it took her breath away.  She closed her eyes and gripped the arms of her chair and waited, and when the light had faded, she drew her coat tight around herself and set off.

She found him deep in the woods, near to the old railway tracks, and she knew at once that he was special.  He lay in the leaves and pine needles, perfectly at rest, and she crouched in the litter beside him and rested a hand on his chest.  It was cool to the touch, smooth and hard and like nothing she had ever felt before.  She sat like that as she studied him, curious eyes wide in the gathering dusk.

He was perfect, a fact which she noted immediately.  There was not a feature out of place, not a single flaw on his white skin.  His face seemed sculpted, created by hands that knew human features only by description: his nose was perfectly proportioned and utterly straight; his eyes clear and evenly spaced; his lips firm but with a hint of sensuality.  She took one of his hands, examined slim fingers devoid of prints.  She stroked his hair, thick and glossy, and sparks flashed at her touch, a crackling corona around his head.

“What are you?” she murmured, sitting back on her heels, staring at him as he lay there.  The question ‘who’ did not occur to her.  He was so obviously, undeniably inhuman that she could not conceive of him having a name.  “And why are you here?”

An angel, came the answer, brushing past her ear as though he crouched behind her.  She spun around but there was no one, and her fingers tingled as they twisted in the front of her coat.

“I don’t believe in angels,” she whispered.

Nevertheless, he said.  Here I am.  And here I must remain.  See to it, Rowan Swann.  Let none disturb my rest, for if man should lay hands on me I will not rise again.

“I’ve laid hands on you,” she challenged.

You are not of mankind, Rowan Swann.  And though she had always suspected, the words chilled her; the last fragile hope that the doctors were right, that she was simply mad evaporated into the darkness.

“How did this happen?” she asked finally.  Her voice was steady and her hands shook like leaves.

And she crouched there in the woods as night fell and listened as he poured his tale into her mind and, unable to weep, she simply held his hand that he might know her sorrow.

They found the body in the forest, just to the west of the old railroad tracks.

Gail’s mother had warned them about walking the tracks, which bisected Linden neatly, a relic of the days when the train had been a viable transportation option.  It had not been so long in Keely Kenzie’s eyes; tales of her adolescence were punctuated by the whistle of the train, found their rhythm in the clatter of wheel on track.  Perhaps it was the memory of those behemoths thundering through town that brought about the ban, but Gail did not see the point of avoiding the tracks now.  The tracks were home to nothing more sinister now than stinging nettles and Gail walked them often.

That day the weather was perfect, the first true autumn day of the year; the air was sharp with the smell of decay, the trees dressed in their most vivid regalia.  They walked through the woods, balancing on the overgrown tracks, swatting at low branches, Gail and her little brother and her best friend.  Gail and Paloma had involved themselves in heated discussion, and so did not even realize that Nolan had strayed until the absence of the sound of his stick swatting weeds registered in Gail’s mind.  She stopped, turned with a frown.

“Nolan?” she called.

“Why does he always do that?” Paloma asked.

“Because he’s a little worm,” Gail said.  They backtracked, calling his name, to which he emphatically did not respond.  Gail’s lips grew thin, echoes of her mother, and her voice rose in agitation.

“Here,” Paloma murmured, nudging her friend.  There was a path of trampled vegetation leading out into the trees, perfectly perpendicular to the tracks.

“I’ll kill him,” Grace said as they followed in her brother’s footsteps.  “He’s not allowed to come with us anymore.”

The path of trodden weeds and grass did not deviate, proceeding in a neat line that terminated at a large pine.  It towered above the younger trees, so tall that to look at its topmost branches was to invite vertigo.  Nolan stood beside it, small hand resting against its trunk, gaze fixed on something hidden behind it.  Gail reached him first, her fingers fisting in the collar of his windbreaker, intending to shake him until he apologized but as she rounded the tree, her hand relaxed, smoothed the back of his neck convulsively.

“Nolan…” she said.

“He’s dead,” Nolan answered, distant and calm.

And he was, unmistakably.  Cushioned on a bed of dry pine needles, the man’s open eyes stared up into the branches that stretched out over him, casting obscuring shadows.  His body was long, lean, and more still than anything she had ever seen before.  There was something inhuman about that stillness, about the smoothness of his skin, like white marble.  About his eyes, too, clear and blue and not quite vacant, as though something only slept behind them, absent but not gone.  Gail felt no fear, only a deep gravity which made her reluctant to move and so they stood, staring at the body and, for a long time, saying nothing.

Shadows lengthened.  The air cooled.  Still, they stood as though locked in place, as though by their observation this stranger’s death could be lent some measure of meaning.  Nolan was the first to stir, his hand dropping from the trunk of the tree.  This seemed to awaken Gail; she started and stepped back, breaking the fragile bubble of solemnity that had enclosed them.

“We should go home,” she said.  Her voice was harsh.  The others obeyed without question, turning away from the body with somber expressions.  “We have to tell Mom…”

“NO!”

They all started, Paloma gripping Gail’s shoulders, Gail hooking an arm around Nolan’s neck and pulling him tight against her.  “Oh my god,” Paloma breathed.  “Oh my god.”  Her words, rapidly muttered, matched the fluttering cadence of Gail’s heart.  Fear made her fingers numb, her teeth chatter.  The woods seemed suddenly darker, the trees taller.  The sound of a stranger’s voice piercing the silence robbed the forest of its sanctity; they all knew they would never again regard it as the haven it had once been.

A woman stepped out onto the path they’d made, eyes wide, slim hands clutching an oversized sweater around her.  Gail backed up, pulling Nolan with her though the woman did not seem threatening.  She seemed, instead, as frightened as the three of them; her voice shook and tears stood in her eyes.

“No,” she repeated.  “You can’t tell anyone.”

“We can’t leave a dead guy in the woods,” Gail answered.  Paloma pinched her arm, tried to drag her away.

“Stop,” she whispered, her lips against Gail’s ear, barely moving.  “She’s crazy.”

“Did you kill him?” Nolan asked.  Gail shook him hard and he made a sharp sound of protest.  “She’s got blood on her!”  And she had, Gail saw; there was red dotted up her sleeves, splashed along the hem of her sweater.  Paloma moaned.

“I did not kill anyone,” the woman said softly, staring down at the red stains.  “He is not dead.”

“Of course he is!” Gail snapped.  Paloma shook her arm, pulled at her, but Gail was no longer fearful.  This strange woman was nothing, a wisp, weak.  Even now, tears were dripping down her face, bolstering Gail’s confidence further.  She was no threat to them.  She was only strange.

“He isn’t,” the woman insisted, dashing away her tears.  “He isn’t dead.  Angels can’t die…”