Chapter 27.1

 

There is a pressure through Roisin, though far gentler than the one that almost crippled her when she was first offered the Horse, this one is more like being led to the bedroom by a loving partner after a long day. That’s a good comparison, really, because the pressure is more like a pulsing, insistent ache, like a heartbeat that isn’t hers. It’s neither painful nor frightening but merely a natural bodily urge, steady and urgent, as though the world has kissed her on her lips and turned her libido up to maximum.

She closes her eyes, every muscle in her pelvis straining to acknowledge the sensation, and the moment she does, it sharpens until ‘max’ was barely a quarter around the dial, leading her not in a direction, but toward a point which doesn’t exist in the real world, for it is not a place a human could ever go, but a point there the world has tilted away from its projected destiny; a point where the Four have drifted out of alignment with the Divine Plan; a point where the Fifth is needed to alter the course of Humanity’s future.

As she reaches the spot, she feels her insides are on fire in a way no lover from college of either gender (and she has experimented) has ever managed to ignite. Not an orgasm, but that sense of lightness, where the mind feels at one with the universe, except that this one isn’t going to climax and fade. She takes a deep breath and holds it while she opens her eyes.

She stands in front of a normal, fifties-style semi-detached house; the sort with three beds and a living room with a bay window to the front and a glassed-in porch big enough to hand coats in but not so large that you could sit in it on a sunny day.

There is nothing to mark it as a pivot for the fate of the world. There is a tidy privet hedge facing the street and a postage-stamp sized lawn bordered with lavender upon which the flowers have bloomed and died without being harvested. A pane of the frosted glass in the downstairs bathroom has a crack in it, one of the dustbins has been disturbed from its place within the neat row and a child’s bicycle lies on its side in the driveway.

It is painfully ordinary, but the mantle shows her what lies beneath the surface of that tiny corner of Britishness. In the kitchen, a woman stands at the sink, her hands immersed in lukewarm water in which the soap has long since surrendered to age and old oil, leaving the surface shiny with a film of grease. Behind her, at a Formica-topped table set for three places sits a man, staring at nothing with his hands on the table in front of him, forearms parallel on the surface. Upstairs, a child sits on the floor next to a bed covered with a SpongeBob duvet, holding their breath and clutching a Star Wars doll, of the kind that was so popular when Roisin’s mum was the age she is now. The silence clouds the house like a Sunday afternoon; almost a living presence invading the spaces between the trio.

There has been no violence here, no catastrophe. No awakening Nephilim or angel trumpeting the opening of a Seal, no demons riding forth from a chasm leading directly to Hell. Just a domestic scale tipping too far in one direction, a family collapsing inward, and a tension that, left unchecked, will ripple outward into something larger, something the Four will feel, something they will be compelled to answer in ways the world cannot bear and survive unscathed.