Oh, the damned could have sex. In the flames. On the frigid tiles. And he did. Bleeding, burnt. Some women he met again, some never. But they were in too much agony to find real comfort or release in their clinches. Maybe it was because he couldn’t have Chani that he wanted her. Maybe it was seeing a woman who could still smile. Or maybe it was
her
smile, in particular.
She had been an environmental activist, besides being an animal lover and a Jew. She had believed in Gaia; that the Earth was like a living, breathing God itself. Ohh...big mistake. On the smooth forehead of her otherwise unmarked pretty face were tattooed the words:
“Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”
They couldn’t mar her prettiness. It wasn’t truly flesh, after all, but the tangible image of her spirit. And how he wished to press the lips of his spirit to hers. And yet he was shy. Of her, of the others around. And there was so little time. So very little time...
Then back to eternity.
Machinegun chatter outside. Screams. Fleming calmly checked over his shoulder. He saw a man slam up against the glass, smearing the blood from the holes in his face as he slid down the surface. Robed, hooded figures came into view, pulled him away. Fleming heard a chainsaw revving up. More screams. Fleming drained the last of his espresso.
“One more?” asked Chani.
“I got time?”
She looked to a wall clock. “Ten minutes, about. You came in at quarter to eight.”
“Eight at night?”
“Yes.”
Only ten minutes left, and yet now Chani was called away from him to tend to another customer down the counter. Fleming was bitter and agonized. He was used to the cold he’d just braved for eight months to get back here. The mutilations, the disease. But it had been a long time since he had had to feel this pain.
When she came back he would take her hand atop the counter, he decided. Squeeze it. He could do that, at least. Link his fingers through hers. Maybe then lean forward and kiss her. Or if not that much, at least he would have broken the ice for next time...
She returned just as he drained his last black coffee. He didn’t have to glance at the clock; he felt the magnetic pull already rising up, like a current, beginning to lightly tug him toward the door. He could resist another minute only...
“Well,” Chani sighed. “Hope you liked it. No tip?”
“Put it on my tab.”
“See you in another couple years?”
“I’ll see you one year from today.”
“Oh come on, you don’t have to do that. There are so many other places to see. It’s something to do, isn’t it? To look around? Even at Hell.” It was big enough, after all. Much, much bigger than Heaven, with its small and elite population.
“There’s something to be said for familiarity, too,” he replied. “Comfort...”
“I guess.”
Oh, this
was
too intense a pain. His body was accustomed to the horrors beyond this jingling door. Humans were so adaptable. Hadn’t he once read that children had still played while imprisoned in Auschwitz? Those children had since told him that in person, since so many of them who had been burned there were here to burn again.
“Well...” he said. The door jingled behind him as a new soul staggered in. He was distracted, and miserable. Her
hand,
he hissed at himself within. It was there flat on the counter...waiting...
The pull was growing stronger. Insistent.
A man seated himself on the stool directly to Fleming’s left. He hated the poor mangled bastard for it. And yet, it was almost a relief to be forced not to act.
Instead, Fleming reached out to Chani’s hair. Or so it seemed for a moment. It was Bast’s sleek fur he stroked. The cat seemed to remember him also, and purred at his touch. Now he felt a little better. They were linked, Chani and Bast. He withdrew his hand feeling that he had also caressed her, in a way. In a way.
The man to his left began trying to speak, his lower jaw gone. It would grow back just in time for him to eat a little bit of something. Chani slid the man a pad to write his order on. She looked irritated at the distraction also. In fact, Fleming thought her eyes even appeared moist...
The pull yanked him backwards off the stool suddenly; he almost fell but righted himself, leaned away from the pull to fight it a moment longer, caught hold of the counter. No one but Chani was looking at his struggles.
“Next year,” he promised her.
“Next year,” she smiled.
He slid toward the door. Through it. Out. The bells jingled. The door closed. Warm yellow light came through the windows, but he couldn’t see anything other than that through them. Otherwise he might stay here and watch Chani through the glass until next year. Mouth conversations to her. Maybe they knew he would want that, and kept the glass one-way.
“Hey, buddy,” a voice addressed him. Two hooded Angels came sauntering toward him, their robes splashed red, one with an UZI and one with a chainsaw. “Agnostic, huh?” Good guess. It was branded across his forehead.
“Nice coat, clown,” the other one mocked him. It was full of bullet holes already, slashed by swords. “Need some new holes?”
Fleming turned slowly and grinned. “How about you?” From inside his coat came the stolen automatic, and he fired. The UZI went off, but he got them good first. Both went down. It might not hurt, and they might regenerate ten times as quickly as he, but he still felt better for it as he bolted away. The air froze the insides of his lungs to crystal. But he laughed. Angry laughter. Sad laughter.
Yeah, those little pleasures. You could still thumb your nose in Hell...in between the Angels cutting it off.
Don’t feel so bad, he cheered himself while he ran. It wasn’t his fault that the breaks were so short, and he’d worked enough years of his life that he should be used to that by now. Bosses were bosses, people were people...as above, so below.
Next year, he’d promised her. Next year, he promised himself.
He had all the time in the netherworld.
THE BOARDED WINDOW
Alan used his trowel to poke at the thing in the rain gutter.
It resembled a dead baby bird; translucent, purple-pink flesh devoid of feathers, crooked limbs like rudimentary wings and legs. But it was as large as a full grown pigeon, or larger. A group of pigeons favored the roof of his mother’s tall old house, sleeping in the cornices and in gaping holes in the eaves. He guessed it was one of those birds, dead and decomposing. Still, it didn’t look long dead. And the mouth...he prodded the small limp carcass once more. The mouth looked more like it possessed lips than a beak.
Disgusted, Alan used the trowel to flip the animal over the side of the gutter to drop into the large trash barrel below.
He had decided to clean out his mother’s rain gutters himself, since neither she nor he could afford hiring someone at the present. The gutters had become more like flower pots in the past few years since his father had passed away; lush green plants filled this one stretch of gutter, no doubt seeded there by the tall tree which grew along the side of the sorrowful-looking Victorian. Alan had borrowed a ladder from a friend, and brought up with him a number of small trash bags to be filled with the plants and the layer of debris they grew in. When each bag was full he meant to drop them down into the bucket.
But the discovery of the bird or flayed squirrel or whatever it might be had distracted him from his project. That, and the broken attic window.
The window was visible from the ground; it ran diagonally, filling a space between a higher and shorter level of the roof where the attic rose above the second story. It consisted of three square panes, none of which seemed able to slide or swing open. However, one of the panes was broken at the corner. From the ground Alan hadn’t been able to see this, the plants in their trough helping to obscure the damage.
Another project. Alan sighed. Well, who else could help his mother tend to these things? For now, he would simply go up into the attic and tape a piece of cardboard over the hole so that no pigeons or squirrels would get in there to make it their home.
He’d do that first. He hated heights, and now found he welcomed the chance to come down from the high ladder.
Before descending, however, he dared to lean closer to the window, near enough to touch it with his fingers if he had cared to stretch, which he didn’t. He tried to see into the attic from here. He had played in it as a boy, despite his father forbidding him from going up there. It had been years since he’d really looked around in there.
He was trying to imagine this diagonal window from the other side, in relation to his memories of the attic rooms. He found he couldn’t picture it from the inside.
He couldn’t see into the attic through it, either. The panes might have been painted black inside, for all he could tell. The most he could make out was his own curious face reflected in the dirty glass, staring back at him.
* * *
When Alan stepped up into the attic a small creature hopped behind a box of books, thrashing its upper limbs. He gasped, became a frozen pose framed in the threshold. Then he heard the cooing, and saw the white droppings on the floor boards. Damn pigeons; how had they got up in here? Why did his mother have to throw bread out for them and encourage them to congregate? When he came further into the attic he saw that a window in this end had been propped open with a board. Mother. She must have done that to let some air in while she was up here one time, and had forgotten to close it again. Alan sighed. He’d have to close it and catch each pigeon individually and carry them outside. Yet another project. Maybe he should just go home, he thought.
For now he left the window as it was, and moved into the darker end of the attic, where the walls angled closer together...
It was no wonder he couldn’t see through the window from the outside. It was thoroughly boarded up on the inside. This also explained why he hadn’t been able to recall the window from the inside from his boyhood; it had apparently been covered like this for many years.
Leaving the attic to borrow his father’s old toolbox from his mother, Alan first gave her hell about the pigeons up there, and then asked, “Why did Dad board up that slanted attic window? On this end of the house, up over the back door?”
“Oh, my father was the one who did that. Your father started to take the boards off once so the attic would get more light, but then he changed his mind and boarded it back up again.”
“Well, why did Granddad board it up in the first place?”
“When your grandparents owned the house there was a big thunderstorm one time, and I guess a lightning bolt struck that window. I remember that night...I was about eight, I think. It was terrible. The whole house shook. I don’t know what the lightning did to the window, though. Maybe it scorched the glass black or just cracked it all.” She shrugged.
“It isn’t cracked. One piece is broken off, is all. Recently, too; I saw the broken pieces in the gutter.”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged again.
“Well, I’m gonna pull the boards off. The attic is real dark down in that end and there’s no electric lights. It could use a little sunlight.”
His deceased father’s toolbox in hand, Alan returned to the back hall, climbed up past the second floor, up into the attic.
* * *
Alan pulled the uppermost board off first, using the back of a claw hammer. The first thought that struck him as he looked out through the glass was how quickly it had become dark. It was only five thirty in the afternoon, and here it was summer. Maybe a thunderstorm was brewing.
He glanced over his shoulder, into the opposite, roomier end of the attic. That end of the attic was awash in golden sunlight. Dust motes swam lazily in the slanting mellow beams.
Alan jerked around to gape at the diagonal window. After a moment of confused hesitation, he began to pry off the next board down. It was nailed thoroughly and he really had to lever and strain, splintering the wood, but at last it clattered at his feet.
The sky out there was almost entirely black, but closer to the horizon was streaked in startling reds and purple. Alan saw a distant cluster of birds or perhaps bats cross the bands of laser red.
Could that be an approaching storm, or was the earth more in shadow in that direction as the sun sank? It seemed far, far too great a contrast to be that. Strangely alarmed, Alan pried off the next board with several great jerks.
“Dear God,” he breathed, stepping back from the window. He clutched the hammer tightly before him as a weapon or merely for reassurance that reality had not abandoned him without leaving some sort of hand hold.
The roofs of neighboring houses should be out there. Trees bushy between them, and familiar church steeples rising against a backdrop of gentle hills.
Should be...
Instead, the distant hills were jagged rocky peaks, ominous in the red glow of twilight. Red and purple light glistened on a lake or large pond in the distance, where he knew none should be. In the foreground there were weirdly gnarled and tangled trees, the closest ones showing him that their branches were thorny and leafless.
Alan wanted to scream, up there in that claustrophobic space, the ceiling close to touching his head, the walls slanting in toward him, dust coating his lungs. He wanted to turn and bolt from there. And yet, he was riveted. Mesmerized. Too afraid to move. Reality indeed was not as it seemed. If he moved, what terrible revelation might next yawn wide before him to engulf his sanity?
Without stepping nearer to the window or reaching to tear free the last board, he looked more closely out upon what could be seen at present. His eyes adjusted to the dark of the scene, and he decided he could make out a few rooftops here and there after all...amongst the thorny trees and across the dark lake. None of these houses or buildings had any windows lit, however, despite the deep gloom.
A breeze stirred the twisted trees; Alan felt it through the broken corner of window, and though the breeze was merely cool he shivered as though it were an arctic gust. He realized then that he could also hear this hallucination as well as feel it; he heard the scrape of those barbed wire branches against one-another as the breeze stirred them. And there were the distant cries of birds, perhaps. Very faint...but he wished, from their odd child-like quality, that he could not hear them at all.