Thomas Sniegoski: Walking In the Midst of Fire

Remy continued to listen, urging him on with a glance.

“But I didn’t want to listen anymore,” Steven continued. “I didn’t want to hide anymore.”

“So you went out there, out onto the streets to confront your fears? Is that what you did?”

Steven chuckled, taking another cigarette from his pack.

“Sounds pretty fucking stupid doesn’t it?” he said, starting to laugh harder.

Remy laughed, too. “It really does.”

“But that’s what I did. I put my gun in my pocket, drove as far as I could, and walked as close as I was able.”

“And did you face your fears?” Remy asked.

“I don’t know what I fucking faced,” Steven said. “It was pretty horrible . . . but I faced it, and I lived to tell about it.”

Remy raised what was left in his glass to him in a toast.

Steven lifted his empty glass in response.

Remy finished off his drink, thinking of how he was going to word his next question.

“So what now?” he asked. He decided to have something more to drink. “Are you planning on walking the mean streets looking for evil to vanquish?”

Steven smiled. “Nothing so dramatic,” he said. “I’m back at work, doing my thing, but I see things differently now.”

“How so?”

“I know what’s really out there now, waiting in the shadows, as do a lot of people, I think, since what happened at the Hermes Building.”

“They were blind, but now they see,” Remy said grimly.

“Yeah, but I at least understand what I’m seeing,” the homicide detective said.

“So, you’re good?” Remy asked. “You’re dealing with this okay?”

“As good as can be expected,” Steven said in all truthfulness. “Am I still afraid of what could be waiting for me around the next corner? You bet your ass I am, but I’ll be damned if I let the fear win.”

They again raised their glasses in a toast, both of them drinking at the same time.

“Marlowe wasn’t the only one who missed you,” Remy said casually.

“You just missed the free booze,” Steven said with a knowing nod.

“Am I that transparent?” Remy asked.

“I was blind but now I see,” he said, throwing Remy’s quote back at him. Steven was smiling and finishing his latest cigarette when . . .

“Ah!” he said, turning in his chair toward his friend.

“‘Ah’?” Remy asked. “‘Ah’ what?”

“Malatesta,” Steven said, snapping his fingers. “The guy from the Vatican . . . What was that all about?”

“Guy from the Vatican?” Remy asked. “What guy from the Vatican?”

A sick feeling swirled with the alcohol that had pooled in his belly.

“His name was Malatesta,” Steven explained. “He was waiting for me outside my apartment right after the business in Back Bay.”

“What did he want?” Remy asked cautiously.

Steven shrugged. “He wanted to know what I could tell him about you.”

“And you told him . . .”

“Everything,” Steven said, his face suddenly very serious.

Remy wasn’t quite sure how to react when his friend caved.

“I’m just fucking with you,” the detective said. “I told him that I knew you were a Boston PI, and that we’d crossed paths a few times in our chosen professions, but that was about it.”

“Did he ask you anything else?”

Steven shook his head. “He verified your office address, thanked me, and left. I figured he was on his way over to talk to you.”

“No, never saw him,” Remy said, suddenly slightly concerned, and very curious.

“I wonder what it’s all about,” Steven pondered.

“I haven’t a clue,” Remy answered.

“The Pope doesn’t know that you’re . . .” Steven made flapping movements with his hands.

It was a tricky question, and one that Remy wasn’t sure he wanted to answer in detail at the moment, so he decided to keep it simple. “No. No, he doesn’t.”

But there had been other popes in his lifetime upon this planet, and one in particular a very long time ago.

On the Outskirts of London Town

1349, During the Time of the Great Pestilence

The angel Remiel, wearing the guise of a man, sat upon the edge of the child’s cot, holding her hand.

The plague was about to claim her life, as it had her father, mother, older brother, and sister.

And he did not wish her to pass from life alone.

The child was burning with fever; the fingernails on the tiny hand that he held were black with gangrene. She thrashed on the straw-filled mattress, and he leaned in close to whisper words of comfort and ease her into the arms of death.

“Fight it no longer, sweet one,” Remiel whispered into the tiny ear inflamed with fever. “Let the sickness that has already taken your family take you, and you will no longer be alone.”

She was looking up at him now, eyes red and bleary with the intensity of the warmth radiating from her small body, mouth moving as she struggled to speak.

The angel listened intently, trying to understand. Squeezing her hand in his, he brought it to his mouth and kissed it gently, lending her some of his own strength.

“What is it, child?” Remiel asked her. “What are you trying to say?”

She was fighting to breathe, lungs clogged with congestion, the glands beneath the skin of her throat black and swollen; but despite her condition she continued to fight to get the words out.

“Where . . . ?” she wheezed.

He was about to answer her, to tell her where her force of life would soon be, joining with her family and the many others who had been taken by the plague this day, but she had not yet finished her question.

“Where’s . . . Dolly?”

Remiel did not understand what it was she asked.

“Dolly?” he repeated. “You want to know the whereabouts of Dolly?”

“Where . . . Dolly . . . ?” the small child gasped, now moving about more wildly upon her bed as if searching for somebody . . . or something.

He was holding her down, to keep her from rolling onto the cold, dirt floor, when he saw it lying crumpled in the corner, beside the hearth. A doll of straw, wearing a dress of burlap.

A dolly.

He left the child momentarily to retrieve the toy and bring it to her upon the bed.

“Is this what you were asking for?” Remiel asked, showing it to her before placing the doll in her waiting arms.

Her bloodshot eyes became wider as she took the toy, hugging it to her body, and she seemed to relax, beginning the process of giving in to the sickness that consumed her.

“That’s it,” Remiel whispered, tenderly wiping a lock of sweat-dampened hair from the child’s forehead. “You can go now that Dolly is here with you.”

She seemed to grow smaller, her body, once tense with the pain of disease and impending death, now relaxing under his watchful gaze. The child’s face grew slack, and there was a brief crackle of bluish white energy that only he could see.

Israfil, the Angel of Death, then appeared to collect the last of the child’s life energies, but the powerful angel did not acknowledge Remiel’s presence there.

The Angel of Death departed as quickly as he had come, and Remiel stood up, looking down at the shell of cooling flesh that had once housed the stuff of life. He looked about at the remains of the child’s family, their bodies in more advanced stages of decay, having passed from the world earlier. It was a house void of all life now, except for the disease and vermin that thrived upon the corpses that rested there.

Remiel let his arms drop to his sides and called forth the fire of God, allowing it to flow into his hands. The fire was hungry, eager to consume anything it was set upon. The angel walked about the tiny home gently caressing the sparse furniture and the bodies that lay putrefying in death, leaving behind the fire of Heaven to quench its insatiable hunger.