Kent Kelly - Archangel

“You need sleep, Silas,” she whispered. “Tell me everything tomorrow.”

He did not answer for several seconds. Sophie looked over her shoulder, terrified, trying to discern the rising and falling of his chest. She could not see him.

Then he murmured, “Jenny, that sound so fine. But did you?”

She waited.

“Did you ask?” Silas went on. “Ben, if he was coming? That boy. Sweet as rain, nothing his fault. Nothing. Boy, he needs his daddy.”

Sophie was almost going to ask, Who is Ben, Silas? But Silas had already drifted off into the reluctant and inescapable gravity of sleep.

And perhaps, for a time, the man christened Silas Colson would struggle on in fitful and jesting heroism. Perhaps for awhile yet, he would live.

( Explanatory note:As researcher and historian, it is imperative that I intercede at this point in my attempted narrative restoration to clarify that Sophia St.-Germain used a digital recorder to imprint the voice of Silas, and that in later days or years she printed his words verbatim before the device itself ceased to remain operational. As such, the testament of Silas hereafter is an exceedingly rare primary document of the White Fire and its horrifying after-effects.

The actual recording itself — wherever the electronic device may be dead and buried now — is surely demagnetized and lost unto the ages. Yet, the words of Silas himself remain. In all of Sophie’s diary, with its faltering and claustrophobic shorthand toward the end, its crowded margins and thrice-layered pages of cramped and flowing remembrances laced in with corrections, the long stories of Silas stand as the only two unaltered entries.

She wrote these stories once, in his words, and never touched them again.

As Sophie clearly believed this survival of the voice of Silas to be of vital importance, as if a spirit, I have retained his testament here in full as it was originally preserved. Any inferences of events to be guessed at from the context must be an exercise to be made solely by the reader. I, myself, shall not corrupt the holy record.

“How I got here? Well, Mrs. S-G. See, now that’s a funny thing.

“I was working in my wood shop, what the grand-kits called ‘Adventureland’… and what Jenny call, ‘That Husbandly Atrocity in What Supposed to Be Our Basement.’

“So. I had my noise suppressor headphones on. And oh, my tinted safety goggles, for my clear ones were up and shatter-spangled by a chip just couple week last Tuesday, I think it was. Ha, Tuesday. What a world.

“What I’m saying is, if I wasn’t so stupid stubborn as to be down there circle-sawing on a length of pine for no real reason at all, while Jenny was baking and the grand-kits were watching Disney Channel, well… I would be deaf and blind now, or worse. Or maybe it would be better, Hell. I don’t know how to say.

“I don’t deserve to be here, cared for you and all Mrs. S.-G., while my Jenny, my Jenny…”

“All right. I’m ready again, and thank you for cleaning up over me. Too much pride to let you do what you done and I have no choice, and so I thank you.

“Down there in the basement I was… well. Not listening to the radio that morning, but having it on to try to not listen to it, see? That goddamn Shelter Panic Bulletin, I was addicted just like everyone else. Because it was horrible, horrible.

“Well, that radio is what got me upset enough to work on the nothing-pine on my saw. Good ol’ Jake Handler on the airwaves. Oh, you know? You listen to him? Oh Lord, I’m sorry. I can see I cut you deep and I don’t know what I say wrong to do so, I am sorry. Don’t you cry, I can’t go on now if you cry.

“There’s my smile. There’s a girl. Lord, if you aren’t the strongest woman I ever did see and I hope you don’t mind me saying so.

“Sophie. Of course I call you Sophie.

“Well, see now, that’s just it. I don’t know how to tell you what came next. I powered down, and I put my face mask up to keep out the choke of sawdust, then I put my WD-40 away. My saw blade was smoking, I was looking for the extinguish-foam, that damn can, and I never even knew how close to fire and how stupid I was being. Like a zombie a-cutting away.

“But suddenly it had struck me and I knew . Oh, Lord, no. That’s all I can tell you.

“Like, like a purring cat who wake straight up and run and jump out the window before the earthquake, see? That’s how I knew that it was coming. Like lightning bolt from the shock of blue.

“ Somehow I knew. I covered my eyes and put my hands over my face.”

“The funny thing was, there was no sound. I’m sure there was , but whatever it did to me, it’s like it was so deafening, so mighty and all-powerful booming that I never even hear it. It was all, it was all light .

“Oh, the light. There is no God within that light, no mercy. Only the everlasting fire.

“The walls melted. Turned bright red.

“The blinding light outside was blood. Blood and it was pouring both out and from inside of me. I swear to you, I saw that through closed eyes, and… I saw the bones in my hands, surrounded by red. Through closed eyes I beheld my flesh and the firmament who holds. Last thing I saw was the blood in my own veins, coursing through my fingers.

“It was only after the light, eternal seconds after, that the heat wave come.

“The air on fire, breath on fire. Like walking out of a walk-in freezer and running out into the desert sun.

“Shivering, so hot it was icy cold. Felt hot on my cheeks, then my face, then my entire body.

“How do I describe it?

“I saw this movie once, that Titanic kid, Leon someone. Not that movie, though. One of the forgotten ones. It was ol’ Musketeer France, and they bolted this iron mask onto his face and the camera, they showed you what it looked just like to get that bolted onto you, what it would feel like.

“And that was just like it. I tell you only that iron mask was red hot as it clamped down, and it was burning.

“I woke like that, my vision turned to waves of not just red and rainbow, but jewels . Ruby was all that I behold, and opal, see? Like there was no sun, like the sun had fallen and was burning apart and disintegrating all around me.

“Like I was lying at the bottom of a crimson ocean, endless tons of pressure up upon me, looking up, up through miles of transparent and whirling waves, up into a ruin once the sky.

“The sky, she not die easy. She still dying. Archangel, writhing in her dance upon the high.

“She was still roaring and afire, and these waterfalls of liquid heat were washing their way over me.

“Live cables were sparking somewhere at the edge of sight, like some monstrous and ogrish welder was working his way through the neighborhood and getting caught up in telephone poles and shattered foundations everywhere. Everywhere .

“Flashes at the edges of once-my-basement, the heart of all that burning hollow, like what? Like when you’re watching one of those old science movies in school, and the projector breaks, and the faces freeze mid-smile and then all melt apart to shock-white right in front of you.

“That’s what it was like. That was everything.

“I saw a burning dog fall into once-my-basement. I smelt it, too. It was making a horrible sound, a squealing, ’til I realized what it was. Already dead. That was just the sound of its insides, baking and popping. Bubbling up out of its stomach which was just a burnt-out hole.”

“Right. Let’s go again.