Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

She was just finishing her second cup of coffee when Mikhail came into the dining room. “It’s here,” he said, and everyone rushed to the windows to look out into the street, where the angel was standing, rather uncomfortably, on its great clawed feet.

Rae put down her cup and dabbed her lips with the linen napkin. “Marta, Beata,” she called. “Bring Elżbieta down and put her in the ambulance, please.” And while the nuns went upstairs to their suite, she went outside.

The angel wasn’t alone. A small group of people had gathered at a respectful distance. Most of them were from the convoy, but she spotted Pargeter and Gottlieb and a handful of soldiers among them. She took a deep breath and walked out into the street.

She stopped a few feet from the angel and said, “Hello.”

“Rae,” said the angel. It was looking shabby ; the nano that made up its body was obviously starting to fail. Its wings were threadbare, there were tatty holes in its jeans, big clumps of its hair had fallen out, and patches of dead white had appeared on its skin. It was on its last legs, its mission almost complete. “You got here, then.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Rae saw Beata and Marta carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle out of the hotel. She said to the angel, “Well, I’m rea —” and the window of the hotel dining room shattered and fell into the street. There was a moment of utter silence, and Rae found herself looking in wonderment at the little hole in the middle of the angel’s forehead. The angel itself was trying hard to focus on it, which made it comically cross-eyed. It looked at her for a moment, seemed to sigh, and then exploded into a huge cloud of smoke. And then everyone started screaming.

Rae looked over her shoulder and saw someone moving in a fourth-floor window of one of the buildings just down the street, and she stepped into the room behind the window and found herself in a little office. Eddy Colorado was making for the door, a long-barrelled rifle with a silencer and a sophisticated-looking sniperscope cradled in his arms.

He skidded to a stop when Rae appeared in front of him. “It lied to me, Mrs Rae!” he protested. “Harry gave me the gun!”

“Oh, fuck off,” said Rae, and suddenly Eddy Colorado was a rapidly-expanding cloud of smoke, just like the angel. The rifle thudded to the floor.

Dust to dust , Rae thought, and stepped back into the street, where everyone was screaming and shouting and running about. She took Elżbieta from Beata and Marta’s unresisting hands. Wrapped in her blanket, the girl seemed to weigh nothing at all. Rae pivoted on the balls of her feet and advanced on Pargeter, who was backing away holding his hands up in a placatory gesture. Gottlieb, to his credit, hadn’t moved an inch.

“I wanted to provoke a response!” Pargeter shouted. “That’s all!”

“If you try to follow me, or if any of my friends are harmed in any way, I’ll give you a response , Mr Pargeter!” Rae yelled.

She turned away from the little spy and found Willem standing in front of her. “Didn’t know you could do that ,” he said calmly.

“Me neither,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek. “Look after things here. We’ll be back.” And she took a deep breath, gathered herself, and stepped into Hyde Park.

There was a serpent in The Serpentine. It was wearing a Tam O’Shanter and its breathing sounded like bagpipes. Rae stood watching it, Elżbieta in her arms, and after a moment or two it slipped away beneath the surface.

The serpent wasn’t alone. Hyde Park had been transformed into an opium eater’s idea of Fairyland. There were lions and tigers bounding across the grass, and monkeys in the trees, and little things with arms and legs and wings flying through the air, and extravagantly-armoured knights riding along the horse-paths on warhorses the size of armoured cars. There were unicorns and manticores and gryphons and princesses and warty dwarves and minotaurs and hobbits and at least one Darth Vader. Gauzy three-dimensional geometric figures danced in the hot, humid, heavy air, forming and reforming and suddenly darting away across the park. It smelled like the inside of a circus tent. It was a madhouse.

She found a tree and laid Elżbieta down gently beneath it. Then she sat beside the blanket-wrapped bundle.

“I have the kill-codes for everything here,” she told the tropical air quite calmly. “I’m going to count to ten and then I’m going to use them. Your turn. One. Two. Three.”

“My,” said a voice behind her. “Aren’t we the feisty one all of a sudden.”

Rae looked over her shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been afraid it would be Peter; she couldn’t have stood that, she’d have just broken . But it wasn’t Peter. It was a little girl, maybe seven or eight, plump in the face and with her hair in ringlets. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress with petticoats and an apron. Tenniel’s Alice.

“Pargeter killed the angel,” Rae said.

“I know,” Alice said. “He wanted to provoke me into doing something. Silly fucker.” The little girl walked over to the blanket bundle. “Is this her?”

“Yes,” said Rae.

Alice lifted a corner of the blanket. There was nothing underneath that resembled a human being. There was nothing but a mass of hands, linked together by short lengths of arm and wrist, writhing and spasming in constant motion, the fingers wiggling and opening and closing. Alice shook her head and said, “What a fucking mess.”

“Little girls shouldn’t swear,” Rae told her.

“Fuck off. I’m really pissed off about what you did to that nasty little fucker Eddy Colorado. I’ll reinitialise him in Belgium; he won’t remember any of this, but it’s a pain in the arse having to do it all the same. I should kick you both out and send you on your way.”

“The angel promised she’d be cured,” said Rae. “I don’t care what happens to me. Just so long as she’s cured. Whatever you are, if you can’t keep your promises you’re not worth my time.”

Alice dropped the blanket and snorted. “Piece of cake. Tell you what, you’ve got lots of questions. So you can have four questions, then I’ll fix her, then you go.”

“Why just four?”

“Because I make the fucking rules and I fucking say so,” Alice said irritably. “And that was your first question.”

“That’s not fair!”

“You don’t like the rules? Fuck off out of here, and take…” she nudged the mass of hands with the toe of a silver-buckled shoe, “… this with you.” She looked at Rae. “Three questions left. Ask me anything. Go on, take your best shot.”

Who are you? Am I real?

“What the hell has all this been about?”

“I’m interested in Pargeter,” said Alice. “I wanted to see what he’d do when he met you and the angel. Turns out he’s a bit of a bastard. That might come in handy. And no, I won’t tell you why. But I’ll save you a question and tell you that yes, I set up Eddy Colorado, and I set you up. It was up to Pargeter what he did with the situation. Call it an experiment in free will. Oh, and yes, I do enjoy being a deus ex machina thank you very much. Next?”

What happened? Has it really been one thousand seven hundred years? Are you where Mars was…?

Rae said, “Is Pete there?”

Alice regarded her levelly. “Yes,” she said. “He’s here.”

What are we here for? What do we do now? Will we be able to speak with you again…?

“Is he happy?”

Alice’s round face crinkled into a sad, beatific smile. “Yes, he is.” She looked at Rae for a moment longer, then she turned and walked away. “All fixed,” she said without looking back. “Now fuck off.”