20.7

 

Paul comes back. His eyes focus and his breath shudders as his fingers dig into the floor. Absently, she can see tufts of wool caught up underneath his short, raggedy-clipped nails, dragging them from the weave of the already-threadbare carpet. “Roisin,” he whispers. “I can’t hold it.”

It is not until then that she sees the truth. Paul isn’t being attacked. He isn’t being possessed. He isn’t being consumed. He is being asked to carry a burden never meant for human shoulders, and he is breaking under the weight of it.

The first thing she feels is recognition. With neither fear nor shock in her heart she realises that the hollow inside Paul is hers. The sense of wrongness surrounding them all – human, angel and mantle alike – is hers. She is the cause of all this. She is the reason for the distortion surrounding him. If not for her, both Paul and Steve – and probably the assistant as well – would be living their lives just as they had last week, and the week before, and the week before that.

It hits her like déjà vu — not a memory, but a return to what she should have been all along. If she’d never come back to Wolverhampton, would any of this have happened? Would the Artist still taken over the gallery here for his paintings? Would Toni still be there, running her modest gallery? Would the assistant still be human?

Her breath catches. What had drawn her back to Wolverhampton? What had brought her to study at the university here in the first place? Truth be told, Wolverhampton was never on anybody’s ‘top ten places to study Art.’ Probably not anyone’s top one hundred places, either.

Her ribs tighten. Has she been manipulated all along?  Who suggested she apply to train at Wolverhampton in the first place? A teacher at school? A college lecturer?

Her pulse stutters in a rhythm that isn’t human. Or was it her father, who left them the day she finished school?

She knows what’s happening to Paul. She knows exactly, because she remembers it happening to her. And that is what terrifies her.

She wants to reach for him but her body refuses. Her hand lifts halfway, fingers trembling, then stops in the air as though the air has solidified into an invisible, impenetrable barrier.

No. Not a barrier. A truth. If she touches him, the horse will leap back to her instantly.

And God will see her.

Her hand shakes and she lowers it slowly, painfully, as though she’s betraying Paul by not reaching for him, after all he’s done for her, but he doesn’t see her hesitation, so focused is he on his own internal battle.

She can feel her rejection. It feels like a self-inflicted wound, and it’s through the mantle that she feels it. As if resigned, she feels her horse reassess the situation, as if it can do its best to make the most of a bad situation.  

It tries to settle into him, not as light or shadow, for it encompasses both, and neither at the same time. It is not visible to anyone but her, though she can see the distortions it causes in his body. The increased mass, enlarged frame. She feels its relief as it expands into lungs that have never been damaged by tar or nicotine, its delight at finding strong arms and thick, wiry muscles

S can hear it the way a musician hears a wrong note — instinctively, viscerally, with a kind of internal flinch. Less of a fingernails down the blackboard and more the tearing apart of the sky as the Challenger shuttle silently explodes of the TV screen, the astronauts on board screaming as they are burned alive from the heat of re-entry.

Paul’s outline flickers at the edges. His breath stutters. His presence feels… doubled, like two rhythms trying to occupy the same body.

Roisin’s stomach twists. She knows what it feels like when a soul is being pushed aside, when the insatiable hunger struggles to become an identity.

She knows because she once was the hunger.

Roisin whispers his name, but it comes out wrong.

“Paul—”

Her voice is too soft, too thin. She is too full of something she can no longer either ignore nor conceal.

She sees the moment he stops seeing her clearly — not because he’s fading, but because the horse inside him is turning toward her like a compass finding north.

Her breath trembles. She is the north.

The pull isn’t physical. It isn’t even emotional.

It’s cosmic. A thread tightening between them, ancient and inevitable, the bond between a Horseman and the thing that carries her. She can feel it pulling at her sternum, her ribs, her name, but it doesn’t know her by the name Roisin. Not even by the name her mother gave her when she was three minutes old, but a name as old as time – older, even, for days were measured in eons then, each as infinite as the last. “Ra’ab.”

She grips the edge of the chair to keep herself anchored. If she lets go, she will move toward him. If she moves toward him, she will take it back. If she takes it back, she becomes Famine and the world ends.

Her knuckles go white.