Robert Sawyer - Fallen Angel

—toward the Ferris wheel, it rotating in one plane, she tumbling head over heels in a perpendicular plane.

She’d thought for sure that she would slam into the spokes of the Ferris wheel, knocking herself unconscious, but that didn’t happen. Instead, she found herself reaching out instinctively with her feet, and hanging like the bat she’d become from one of the spokes, and—

No.

No, he could not be that cruel, that wicked ...

But, if he could not, who could be?

It was as though her ankles were pierced through, like Christ’s, and yet not like Christ’s, for hers were joined now by a small axle, a spindle upon which she hung, rotating along with the great wheel, always facing down, pointing head-first toward the ground.

She thought briefly of a butterfly, pinned on a collector’s sheet. He was a collector, too, of course ...

The wheel rotated on, and she hung from it, a macabre bauble, with skeletal fingers that once had supported flight membranes now hanging limp, like the boughs of a dead willow.

He had won, of course. Angela imagined he always won—and, she supposed, always would win. And, as she hung upside down, a pendant, she thought of her Poppa, and her fear of falling, and of failing him. No, things hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped, but, still, this wasn’t so bad; the old fears were indeed dead.

The wheel continued to turn. She felt sure it would always turn; no fireman could cut her free, no ladder would ever reach her. She rather suspected that the devil did not leave fingerprints, that she—indeed, the whole damned wheel, and its other occupants, whom she caught only horrid glimpses of—could only be seen when the lighting was just so, when it was not quite dawn, or just past dusk, when you weren’t really looking.

She was up high now, the wheel having rotated her to her topmost position, the zenith of the cycle, the pinnacle of her punishment. Here, facing down, looking at the ground, at the hard, unrelenting earth—the crust over the underworld, the veneer over the furnace from which the wind that had propelled her along had doubtless come—here, it was frightening, for if the spindle broke, if her ankles slipped off the axle, an axle greased with her own blood, she would plummet face first to the hard, hard ground.

But that wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t ever happen.

The wheel continued its rotation, with Angela always pointing down. At the nadir of the cycle she was indeed rather close to the ground, the ground that had shattered Carlo’s spine, the ground that she had feared for so long.

But then she started upward again.

Had Poppa seen any of it? Had Momma? Had Carlo looked up long enough to see her transformation, her fall, her flight, her capture? Or had it all happened somewhere outside of human perception; certainly, she, just nine when it had occurred, hadn’t seen anything unusual when Carlo fell— jumped —from the high wire.

Poppa would now have to do what he’d always feared—bring an outsider into the act, take on someone new to be the pinnacle of the pyramid.

She hoped whoever it was would look after Carlo.

The wheel took her down once more, bringing her close again to the ground.

It really was a comfort knowing that she was never going to hit it.