32.3

 

“It is me.” Roisin turns her hands around to look at the back. She can see the underlying structure of the mantle beneath the skin, but the skin is exactly the one she’s been used to since her last growth spurt; the exact one she saw in the mirror—was it only yesterday?

Now that she’s managed to focus her sight, she feels the world sharpen around her — not with omniscience, but with pattern. Overlaying the framework of the world is a geometry, and over the geometry is laid a pattern. Layers upon layers of pattern. Social conditioning, familial conditioning, religious traits, anthropological fears, phobias, joys, delight, trauma and learned behaviour. Everything that makes up a person, their relationships to both the people around them and the world in general; their education, their misapprehensions—all go into the melting pot that make then their individual selves and what’s more, she can mentally strip away those layers as easily as separation the icing from a child’s birthday cake.

She  looks up toward the ceiling, and she can either look at the cracked and yellowed plasterwork, or she can look through it to the boards beneath, Steve’s room above that with its softly pulsing objects imbued with fractals and faith; and past them to the rafters, the eaves, the roof, the layers that make up the sky; the debris orbiting the earth, and beyond, all the way to the distant galaxies and past those to the void itself.

Worse than that, she can peel away the layers human beings coat themselves inside like the layers of hardened mucus covering a pearl. She turns a slow circle, looking at each of them in turn. Beneath Steve’s humour and ambition lie his false bravado, and that is covering a fear so deep rooted that it will take ever her some time to unravel, and he would probably not enjoy her probing.

Paul carries a huge burden of guilt. For letting his mother down by leaving Ireland to pursue life as an artist, and the persistent sense of letting her down further every day he doesn’t become a world-famous sculptor; even more so on those days he doesn’t manage to goad himself into actually working on something other than serving drinks and imbibing them himself. He’s almost lucky the world is about to end, because his liver will fail within the next three years and the only compatible doner will be the family he’s too ashamed to contact.

The assistant was an enigma to the old Roisin, but now she can see through the layers to the surprisingly simple truth behind her exterior. Despite her complete lack of soul, for it was taken forcibly from her by a creature darker than any she has yet encountered, she is a highly complex being; once human and now existing solely on the dependence of flesh. She is not a ghoul, despite Astaroth naming her one, but an actual bona-fide zombie. Not a mindless corpse, but a person unable to generate the fractals of souls that is the angels function to harvest. She survives by the absorption of slivers of fractal souls that exist within the flesh of lesser creatures, which she consumes.

Namaan is probably the simplest of them all. Below the surface he has the simple desire to be loved, to be needed, to be desired. His drive is merely to survive, and his terror of erasure of death by those of Heaven is outweighed only by the fear of returning to the hidden cages where the Four protected them from the sight of God. Or whoever holds that mantle now.

Finally, Astaroth, who is the easiest of them all when she looks below the layers of confidence and arrogance he protects himself with. He genuinely believed they were all better off without the yoke of the Creator, and what he wants is to unite his Fallen brethren with the other angels. There are companionships he would rather renew than not; and although friendships is too remote a word for what binds angels together, it is friendship he desires most of all. He reminds her of a thousand villain’s henchmen in a million films. He is Batman’s butler, Alfred; He is Tom Sawyer’s best friend, Huckleberry Finn; he is Jesse Pinkman to Breaking Bad’s Walter White. It is unclear who he casts as his protagonist, though. Sometime he thinks it’s God, but mostly he has allocated the role to Lucifer. Roisin sees Lucifer through Astaroth’s viewpoint. The Adversary is neither Demon nor Angel, just a flawed being with creative ideas and a distinct lack of ability to know when to keep his opinions to himself.

Most of all she can see Hasmed. He is moving purposely through the planes to find her, and despite his prior efforts to eradicate, he is certain that with the mantle of knowledge, the victory this time will be his.

Roisin has no feeling of judgement toward any of these people. Better, she believes she has the capability now of understanding them and helping them align themselves with their core beliefs. Except for the assistant, whose overriding thought is satiating her hunger.

And Paul seems to be her favoured Dish of the Day.