Chiaroscuro

  Paul doesn’t fall or collapse. He folds, as though something inside him has suddenly become too heavy. His shoulders curl inward, his spine bows, and his hands hover in the air like he’s trying to catch something that isn’t falling. Roisin feels it before she understands it — a tug in her chest, a hollow ache that answers the hollow forming in him as he looks up at her. And she sees it: a shimmer around him, faint at first, like heat rising from hot tarmac, except the room is cold. As hot as it was from the pressure of the Horse’s appearance, now it becomes so cold that they can see their breath condensing in the room. Paul’s breath changes. He isn’t gasping or choking, it just seems wrong to her. It’s too slow, too shallow. She’s used to watching someone breathe. Endless hours of life classes, waiting for the model to breath in or out so that their shoulders, their ribs, their clavicles move into precisely the right position. He breathes as though each inhale must fight it...

  Their disagreement ceased as Roisin cried out again, the emptiness threatening to swallow her whole soul and cast it into the void. I felt like an eternity of torment, but she had only a scant few moments to decide. She must accept the mantle of the horse or let Paul be cast into the void with her. Steve grabbed her shoulders. “Roisin!” The assistant whispered, “She’s suffering. They’re both going to die if she doesn’t take it.” Steve stared at her. “What do we do?” The Artist stepped forward and bent to engage Roisin face to face. “You have to choose,” he said, his milky eyes staring into hers. “You have to choose now.” Roisin looked up at him. She struggled to moisten her mouth enough to speak. “I do,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I choose to save the world.” He touched her forehead just as he had with Paul, but this time the world exploded with light. The light from his touch faded slowly, like the after image of a spotlight distorting the colour from h...

 Roisin swallowed. “What am I remembering?” “Who you are,” he said. “Who we are.” Steve lowered his cross and stared at him. “You’re Pestilence.” The Artist nodded. “One of the Four.” “And Roisin is—” “Famine,” the Artist finished. “Though she’s wearing the wrong skin at the moment.” Roisin felt the room tilt. “I’m not whole.” “No,” the Artist said gently. “You’re not.” Paul bucked again, a long, inhuman wail escaping from a mouth that should never be able to form such a song of despair. Roisin could feel the echo of it inside her, and though she gave it no voice, still it echoed through her, the way a star swallowed by a black hole will emit a death-scream despite the vacuum of space that surrounds it The Artist glanced down at him. “Your horse is impatient.” Steve blinked. “Are we talking a literal horse, here. Or a metaphorical one?” The Artist squatted to rest two fingers on Paul’s forehead. The agony he was expressing as he battled the warhorse visibly eased, and his face soft...

  Steve nodded slowly. “Because if the remaining seals stay closed, the world continues on.” “In a manner of speaking.” The Artist stepped closer to them. This close, Roisin’s skin – her human skin, she reminded herself – began to prickle and itch. She could see that Steve’s did too, for he scratched at his arm as if bitten by a gnat on a summer evening. Paul’s skin was coming out in a rash as well. At least it proved he was still alive and fighting to remain in control. A glance to her right shower the assistant suffered no effect from the Artist’s proximity. That was interesting. It implied whatever was infecting them all needed life -- soul energy – to proliferate. “What’s that supposed to mean?” The Artist shrugged, his loose scarf swaying with the movement, its colours shifting from the light Arabic pattern she’d first noticed to a coruscating blend of oranges and earth tones, reminiscent of a forest floor under late morning light. Then it was back as before. “Damage has...

“Paul?” Steve turned his attention from Roisin to their flatmate. “You all right, mate?” The stonemason didn’t stir. “Ah, fuck, dude.” Steve knelt by his side. “Why did you have to get in the way? We could have handled it.” “He’s not dead.” Roisin rose from her kneel and stepped forward. “I’d have seen his soul fly if he was.” “Are you sure?” Steve looked at her and then back to Paul. “You’ve not been in the soul trade very long and he looks pretty dead.” “She’s right.” The assistant stepped forward, standing just behind Roisin. She’d have got closer to Paul, but the room wasn’t big enough for full grown man to be tended by three mourners. “He still has fractals coming out, though they’ve changed. They were normal before. All the shades of a watercolour palette but now…” “Now they’re dark.” Roisin placed a hand on her friend’s cheek. “He took what should have been mine, and now his soul fights to gain the right to stay.” Steve turned his nose up. “What does that even mean? ...

  The flat felt too small for the universe now sitting inside it. Roisin knelt on the floor, breath trembling, the pressure inside her chest pulsing in rhythm with her openly visible heart. Famine and her. Hunger and desire. The Horseman and its mortal accomplice. Steve hovered beside her, trying to help but his expression denoted physical disgust at the sight of Roisin’s chest occupying a space outside of the realm of the room; almost inverted like a horror-movie nightmare in at least three-dimensional technicolour if not more. Paul stood frozen, staring at the distortion in the hallway. The assistant pressed herself against the wall, eyes wide, as though bracing for a storm only she could feel coming. “Accept my nature or deny it and condemn the world,” Roisin whispered, “I have to choose.” Steve shook his head. “Not yet.” Paul swallowed. “Why?” “She’s barely even begun her life. It shouldn’t end this quickly. She’s too young.” Roisin looked up at him. When she spok...

  Steve’s voice was barely audible. “Roisin… you’ve lost me now. What have you got hidden inside you? I’m guessing this is not a euphemism for something.” Roisin closed her eyes. “And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.” “You have a trumpet inside you?” Paul grinned. “That must play havoc with the scanners at the airport” Roisin could see Steve suppress a smile before saying “time and place, mate. Time and place.” “Sorry.” Paul looked her up and down, much as if she’d been a single woman sitting at the bar in a pub. “Where? You don’t look big enough.” Roisin rolled her eyes. “I probably don’t look big enough to embody an angel, either, but I guara-fuckin-tee you I am one.” She took a deep breath and for a moment, the light in the room bent around her. “When the seals are opened the trumpets herald the final seven woes to befall the damned. So naturally, they want the trumpet back. We, however, want to stop the seals from o...

“But that’s really bad.” Paul gripped Roisin’s arm harder. “That’s like the end-of-the-world bad. That’s seas turning to blood and everyone fighting and the righteous go to Heaven and monsters and giant wasps and—” “Helicopters.” Steve nodded toward the doorway, where the pressure was building again. “Ever since I saw the first footage of a Sikorsky helicopter in nineteen-forty I’ve been expecting the seals to be opened. Helicopters look a lot like wasps, don’t you think? Modern helicopters especially, and even more so now they have efficient single-person machines. Imagine being a twelfth-century writer and seeing helicopters dropping napalm onto Viet Nam. They hadn’t even invented motorised vehicles by then. Wouldn’t you think they were giant wasps spitting fire?” Paul thought about it, nodding. “I suppose so. Is that true, Roisin? Are we already in the end times?   Roisin looked at him. Her voice was quiet. “The end of the world started before we were even born, Paul....

"Time is short." The Artist pulled back, away from the doorway. His wings rippled under the waver of pressure pulsing from the portal he was holding open. "The Children grow restless. They must be protected, despite their protestations to the contrary. I can feel them straining against their prisons, trying to break free of the bindings I wove about them." He looked directly at Roisin. "You should not have come to the gallery. They recognised you and thought it time to awaken from their long sojourn." He gave a wry smile. "I had the devil of a time to quieten their spirits after you left." "Please don't tell me devils are real as well." Paul had uncurled from his foetal position, though the assistant still had her arm around him. " Part of the reason I studied art was to dispel the whole idea the people like Bruegel and Bosch had made up all that Earthly delights shit because they were commissioned by the Church. "As real ...

 Writer's Note: This whole chapter is mostly bollocks and literary wanking. I may cut most of it out in the edit. “We don’t have free will as angels?” She raised an eyebrow. “I thought free will was the whole point?” “We have… discretional leeway,” the artist said. “Although any decisions not in line with the Creator’s guidelines are liable to be be scrutinised by the Recording Angels.” Steve looked up at that point, his eyebrows raised. He held one finger vertically, as if to ask a kindergarten teacher if he could go to the bathroom and, sensing a lull in the narrative, asked a question: “Then what happens?” The artist did not bother to cover his irritation with the question. “If they agree with us then all is well. It they do not agree, then certain countermeasures are put in place.” Steve shrugged. “Such as?” “Consequences vary. Our decision might stand, but with liens and stipulations placed upon it, such as the applicant can have his life extended but only be able to...

  Roisin felt a familiar emotion threatening to overwhelm her. All her life she’d felt there was something going on she didn’t know about; some secret that other people knew but she wasn’t privy too. All that shit about her being a ‘miracle baby’ when her mum had supposedly been barren; all the times when boys had been given awards over her when her achievements were obviously greater than theirs; all the ways men had been allowed to do and say things women would have been crucified by the press for. And know the ‘men’ were talking over her, acting as if she were just a child asking the adults to ‘look at me’ while she performed a clumsy pirouette she’d seen on Cinderella. Righteous – quite literally in this case – indignation rose up from her core. She held a finger up to Steve. “You know way more about all this than you’re letting on. I’ll be having a good talk with you when I’m finished with all this.” She turned back to the Artist. “You avoided my question. Who are these chil...

  The pressure from the hallway increased until Roisin felt like her brain was going to be forced through her ears and then, as suddenly as a dog’s unexpected bark, the pressure dropped. Her ears popped like they did when she’d gone up the tower at St. Peter’s when she was a student and she felt alright again. Neither air pressure not the discomfort inside her chest remained remained; no pulses threatened her stability; no need for energy made her hunger for life forces. If anything, there was an opposite feeling, like the delight of a magnet when it finds another of its kind and wants to align polarities and join together.   She breathed a sigh of relief and looked around the room. Paul was still hefting his half-finished carving, Steve was sweating profusely, even though the room felt, if anything, colder than it did and the assistant… The assistant was cowering behind Paul’s chair. “He’s here. He’s here.” She muttered, not looking up from her crouched position, while rock...

  Paul scowled. “Hardly the same thing, is it? I paid a lot of money for that.” “Only with your expendable income. The ten-year-old who made it got paid just enough to keep her alive for a day.” “Boys! Enough.” Roisin held up a hand as a warning. Her tone was sharp enough to make both men pause and look at her, then follow her gaze toward the hallway were the shadows shifted like coal smoke on a misty morning, seeping and gathering beneath a heavier presence. Something moved. Not loudly. Not visibly. But undeniably. Roisin whispered, “Something else has come.” The flat seemed to hold its breath. The air itself seemed to pause, as though the molecules had stopped vibrating. The hair on Paul’s arms rose; the primal response of the body to make itself look bigger and more of a threat to fight, despite the state of mind of its incumbent soul. The ends of the assistant’s fingers turned white as they dug into the chair cushion. Steve stepped instinctively closer to Roisin...

  “The beginning of what?” The assistant stepped forward, trembling. “Roisin… why did you kill an angel? What did it want?” “I already told you—” Roisin hesitated, took a breath, channelled some patience from the infinite other part of herself. “Sorry.” She shook her head. “It wanted to stop me from doing what i… what the other me… does.” “And what is that, exactly?” Roisin looked directly at her. There were no fragments in the assistant. No soul. No reason for her to continue existing in a state that merely leached the energy it needed to survive from the people around it. And yet… And yet it had thoughts and feelings. Independence. It had free will. She felt the other part of her want to end it immediately. It was a perversion of the eternal cycle of life and yet the Roisin part of her pitied it. Valued it. Wanted its friendship. She took another breath and forced a smile. “It wanted to stop me from releasing them.” Paul’s breath caught. “Releasing who?” Roisin pressed ...

 Not physically — but perceptually, as though her memory cast a shadow over the present. “There was a nothingness,” she whispered. “A place outside time. A place between Heaven and the world. A place where the world waits to be told what will happen next.” Paul stared at her. “You’re talking like— like you were there.” “I was,” Roisin said. “I stood upon nothing and I was everything there was and everything there will ever be. I felt the heat of the Beginning. I felt the cold forever of the End. I felt the silence that comes before and after. And I felt… him.” Steve’s voice was low. “The presence.” Roisin nodded. “He appeared in a ball of light. So much light. Wings. Fire. Purpose. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t cruel. He just was. And he wanted me gone from the world. From existence.” The assistant whispered, “And you fought him?” Roisin opened her eyes. She felt neither satisfaction nor triumph. Only the quiet weight of inevitability and the sadness of a return to the Circle of what ...

  The flat was too quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of late evening, or the uneasy quiet after an argument — but the kind of quiet that feels like the air is waiting for something to arrive. Paul paced the living room in tight, anxious circles. The assistant sat rigidly on the harder of the two chairs, hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were white. Steve stood by the window, staring out into the dark garden as though expecting the night itself to knock. None of them spoke. The only sound was the creaking of floorboards as Paul paced, paced, paced and the battery-operated tick of the clock in the kitchen, amplified by a trick of the architecture and the sound-enhancing quality of the landlord’s cheaply applied decoration. Until the temperature changed. A soft drop — not cold, not warm, but empty, as though the air had been hollowed out. Paul stopped pacing. The assistant’s breath caught. Steve turned from the window, eyes narrowing. The floorboards in the hall groaned wi...

The void was silent. Not the silence of night, nor the silence of emptiness — but the silence that comes before a truth too large for sound. The void trembled with heat that wasn’t heat, light that wasn’t light. The Mundis bent and fell away, as though it were no more important than the song of an egret in the marsh. A shadow descended fast, wings shimmering in the light-that-was-not-light, a hundred claws reaching out to tear the life from Roisin’s battered corpse. She stepped out of Mundis with the quiet certainty of someone who had never once been denied entry. Her wings were neither black nor white, but the colour of absence — the shade left behind when something has been erased from the world. They folded behind her like the closing of a Bible at the end of an exorcism. For there was no doubt. This was an exorcism; an expulsion of a spirit. Not in the name of God, but in the name of the world. She stepped to one side, the fractal essence of the tiny demon flowing through...

  Everything was chaos. One part of her could see the walls of the flat, shabby, dark, smoke-stained and badly in need of fresh rendering; the kitchen just a few steps away and the other part of her – an equal part that thought and felt as independently as the other – was soaring through an infinite space where the was no up or down; no landmarks to fix upon, no stars to guide an errant ship. She was not alone in this void. A few metres away (and what is distance when the space you occupy is endless?) flew a being of dazzling light she could only interpret as eyes and circles and wings… And claws. Claws that were currently ripping at her, tearing away the flesh she once held so dear, sending plumes of fractal splinters streaming into the void, where they were being sucked away by creatures unseen; wraiths that inhabited the edges of her senses, almost visible as they gobbled up her lost energy, the way a last meal is briefly visible in the stomach if it’s excised from the bod...