19.5

 

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 rocking backwards and forwards on her heels.

“Who’s here?” Steve glanced at her for only a moment before returning his attention to the door. “Is it… is it the other part of you?”

Roisin already knew. “It’s the Artist.”

He turned the corner from the kitchen hallway and entered the room, pausing in the doorway to survey Roisin and her three friends. He was smaller that she remembered from the gallery – was that only yesterday? – but perhaps it was just that she had grown so much in the few hours between their meetings. He had, she realised with her clearer sight, fewer wings than Yabamiah, each pair folded neatly inside the next, like a stack of Matryoshka dolls. At least this one was in human form and not all eyes and claws. It raised one human-like hand and spoke, its voice modulated like the echo from an underground stream. “Be not afraid.”

Paul was taking no chances. He hefted his stone as if he were David facing Goliath, except with infinitely less chance of winning. “I’m warning you tee stay back,” he said, though despite the Artist’s assurance, the warble in his voice betrayed his fear.

Steve placed a hand lightly on Paul’s arm, adding just enough pressure to lower the sculptor’s arm until the stone became overbalanced and he was forced to lower it to the floor, his arms shaking, though with fatigue or terror, Roisin could not tell.

“Who are you?” Roisin asked, though she needed no response to her question. She could feel the other part of her responding to the angel before her. This was her missing part. She was Azrael; Azrael was the Artist, and the artist was her. Each part separated, each part equal, each part yearning for what it was not.

“You know who I am.” The Artist stayed in the doorway, declining to enter the room fully. “I am you. The part of you who holds the gates closed. The part of you who will tear the gates asunder.”

Roisin shook her head. “What gates? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do.” Having successfully disarmed Paul, more to prevent his immediate destruction rather than concern for the angelic being in the doorway, Steve stepped up to Roisin and gently but firmly, pulled her a step back, increasing the distance between her and the Artist. “You’ve already told us once. The gates of Hell.”

“You should not have come to the gallery.” The artist looked up, his gaze far away as if he were looking not at the stains on the living room ceiling but the sky, the cosmos, the heavens above. “Like all of the Creator’s children, I am not infallible. I thought displaying the gates would bring the Children out of hiding. I did not expect them to draw all the parts of our Selves together.”

Roisin shook her head. “Children? What Children? If I am part of you, why don’t I remember all this?”

The artist spread his hands. “We are Azrael. We are the beginning and the end of all things. We are what came before and what comes after. We were at the Beginning and we will be at the End.”

“The one to shut the door and turn the light out.” Steve shook his head. “But that time can’t be yet. There is so much more to learn.”

“It was not supposed to be, yet there are those who would see it come to a premature end.”