Chapter 20.1

 


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 spoke, it was with the echo of a village of starving children when their homes had been razed by napalm. “I was old before I was born.”

The distortion pulsed again — a slow, deliberate contraction, like a heartbeat. The air thickened as the shadows deepened and the angel reached forward. The hallway stretched, bending inward, as though the flat itself were being pulled inside out.

The black angel flowed into the living room, heading straight for her, distorting the walls and ceiling like an Instagram filter on an insecure girl. Paul released Roisin’s face and took a leap toward it, as if he intended to tackle it to the ground for a Try in the Five Nations Cup. Instead of connecting with it, he stumbled forward, swallowed into the billowing darkness and becoming part of it; part stonemason, part angel, part void.

Part Creation. Part Destruction.

Roisin closed her eyes as her outstretched ribs contracted like the boneless arms of an octopus. Despite being without it all her life, the loss of the black angel hit her like a physical blow; a depth of loss that made the one she suffered when her father had walked out seem like a child’s cry over the loss of a biscuit to the family dog.

“No!” Her body closed with the finality of a locking vault, the hunger of a black hole for all the stars of the galaxy left in its wake. She felt emptier than the void between worlds.

The intrusion the black angel had caused reversed, the walls and ceiling rippling like a smoke-haze as it flowed backward toward the portal. Roisin gasped as the pressure inside her chest flared — a burst of heat and cold and darkness that made her vision fracture. The room blurred. The walls bent. The ceiling rippled like water. The pressure dropped suddenly and the portal slammed closed faster than the shutter of an old film camera.

There was a wailing in the air. It was the mourners at the wake for a religious figurehead, the cry of geese as they fled south on an autumn morning; the shriek of a child as its mother is forcibly detained by border agents.

Roisin opened her eyes.

It was her.

“Roisin? Are you hurt?” Steve dropped to one knee, checking her face. “Your nose is bleeding.”

She closed her mouth, effectively stopping the noise though the mourning went on and on inside her head. She wiped the back of her hand across her face, and it came away with a streak of blood; a splash of red against a white canvas. Judith Rhead’s lifeblood across white-painted woodchip as her son, David, raised the hammer for a second blow. She shook her head, brushing away his concern. “It’s nothing.”

The assistant whispered, “Is it coming? The end of the world.”

Roisin made a deep sigh, the skeletal fingers of loss pricking at her tear ducts as she shook her head once more. “Not yet. We have time yet, but the world is lost. I cannot defend the Children when I cannot defend myself.” She raised herself to her knees and sat back against her heels. If this body was young, she did not feel it. She felt as old as the world and a little more. All those around her were as mayflies to an elephant.

Between her and the living room door, Paul lay on his side, his neck twisted and his mouth open. His eyes were closed, and she was glad she could take a moment before the full implication of what he’d done for her sank in.

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