Chapter 15.1

The gas fire was on, not because it was particularly cold, but they all felt the need for a touch of artificial cheeriness. Steve had deposited Roisin in Paul’s chair, which they all considered the best one, and in the absence of any spare light bulbs, had fetched a small desk lamp from his room. He’d pugged it in near the door, and it at least highlighted the threadbare carpet.

Paul entered bearing three brimming mugs from the kitchen. “This is a vegetable cube dissolved in water,” he said, passing one to each of them and keeping one for himself. “It was either that or black tea, because nobody’s bought any milk recently, and I hate drinking tea black. Unless we have lemon, but there isn’t one this side of the supermarket.”

“Cheers bud.” Steve took a sip of his salt-laced drink and almost managed to control his hiss as the steaming liquid burned the roof of his mouth.

“So is one of you going to tell me what’s actually going on?” Paul dragged the coffee table away from the good chair and used it as a stool. Putting his hot mug on the floor, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the little figurine Steve had left on the stairs. “I know this is one of your ‘liberated’ artifacts, Steve, and I also know that none have them have ever left your room before. So why was this one on the stairs? I also know that you were lying about the so-called intruder, because no-one went past me through the front door and I’ve checked the rest of the flat and none of the windows were left open.”

“Best you don’t know, mate. What you don’t know can’t hurt you an’ all that.” Steve didn’t look up from his broth, not even to glance at Roisin.

“Yeah, that’s your usual answer to everything. ‘Look the other way,’ ‘Don’t let the left hand know,’ ‘There’s more religions in the world, Horatio’.” Paul held up one hand in a ‘stop’ signal and looked at Roisin. “Is this to do with the angels you’ve been seeing?”

Steve looked up then. “You’ve been discussing this with Paul? Don’t you know how dangerous they are?”

“I do now.” Roisin sat forward in her chair, both her hands wrapped around the mug like a homeless man around a warm pipe. “I didn’t before. I just thought I was seeing things. Angels inside people’s bodies. I didn’t know until just now that what I was seeing was a person’s spirit.”

“Soul would be a better descriptor.” Steve put his mug on top of the gas fire and rose, pacing the living room like a bluebottle around a Sunday roast. “Except that souls have a religious connotation that make it get lost in translation. Every religion known to man, and most of those no longer openly practised, have a concept of the soul. The Native Americans come the closest, with the concept tat everything has a spirit which can combine with other spirits to make stronger ones.” He stepped across to Pauls temporarily abandoned carving by the window and picked up a piece of the chipped off stone from the dust. “This tiny rock has a soul, see, but it was only one voice in a whole choir while it was still attached to the bigger piece, which was itself one voice in a choir when it was still part of its own landscape.”

Roisin frowned. “So is the carving, the main piece of stone, weaker for its loss?”

“No. That’s the beauty of it. Soul is never wasted, it just transforms. The block gets stronger because it has Paul’s energy inside it, Paul gets stronger because of the food he eats.”

“But doesn’t that mean that the net soul on the earth remains a constant?”

“But doesn’t that mean that the net soul on the earth remains a constant?”

“Yes. Exactly.” Steve stopped pacing for a moment to point at her. “Clever girl.” He resumed pacing. “But that supposes the earth is a closed system.”

Paul shook his head. “Well, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me there are little green men popping in from outer space to top us all up from time to time?”

“Yes.” Steve tapped his temple. “And no. No little green aliens, but lots of massive white angels. When God – and I’m using ‘God’ as a placeholder for something we can’t even imagine yet – when God made the Heavens and the Earth, and notice I didn’t say ‘Heaven’ there, because that’s just a name we’ve assigned to His metaphysical realm, which already existed or else how could he have existed also, He created the angels first, mankind second and the animals last of all. Now if he hadn’t used all that soul stuff to make people, animals, plants, ions and atoms, the angels would have had much more to themselves, which led to squabbling, which lead to fighting, which led to war and the evolution of angelic forms into the myriad of beings we refer to as ‘supernatural.’”