Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Go to sleep,” Peter said.

“I’ll go to sleep,” Tercin said. “But not like you. You will sleep the sleep of death. Nobody wakes up from that. Not until the last trump is blown. Goodnight, brother. Goodnight and goodbye!”

“I’m not even listening,” Peter said. “None of your dumb talk matters.”

“Yes, that’s a sign. The deafness and then the spots and then the feeling in your skin like you’re being flayed. Oh yes, I heard about another case down in Homer. A girl who took a month to die but she was suffering the whole time. Suffering!”

“Can’t you just be good to me for once?” Peter asked, and then turned on his side and put his pillow over his head, not waiting for Tercin’s answer. His brother was quiet after that. Afraid to close his eyes, Peter took a long time to fall asleep. He was afraid the woman would be there, painted on the back of his eyelids, suspended in the blue air. Yet when he slept he dreamed not of her but of Sara. He was salting corn for her at the feast, sprinkling grains from a cellar and asking her, “Is it enough, my love?” and always she said, “Just a little more, my darling!” And he would have been content to salt her corn all night long, but he was woken out of the dream by a gentle tickling on his face. Tercin was standing above him in the square of moonlight from the window, a brush in one hand and a pot of ink in the other.

“Aw shit,” his brother said, throwing down the brush in Peter’s bed, and slamming the ink pot down on the floor. He stormed out of the room. Peter washed his face in the bowl on their dresser. When he fell asleep again he dreamed of nothing at all, and when he woke the next morning he felt entirely well, no hint of fever and no ache in his bones, and even when he tried he could barely remember what the falling lady looked like. He was delighted to discover that he couldn’t even remember if her hair had been brown or black.

His mother pronounced him well at the breakfast table, and no one tried to keep him from assisting with the final preparations for the Lammas feast. After lunch he helped George lay down the maze, placing the sheaves as his brother directed, pretending not to study it too much, because he would run the race with all the other children later that evening and didn’t want to give the impression of cheating.

At the start of the feast, as Reverend Wallop blessed the corn and the meat, and during the marionette dance, a few people, Sara’s mother and Mr. Hollin and some others, gave Peter wary stares. It’s not a light thing, to have a fit, no matter Mrs. Clark’s airy theories of the cause. Everybody knew it was bad luck to have one, or be around someone who had one, and Sara’s mother had even suggested that they delay the Lammas feast by a week, so it wouldn’t be spoiled by the bad omen. And he saw Tercin whispering here and there, spreading fantastic lies, no doubt — he had twelve more fits since he came home from school, one every two hours, yes, with every even set of chimes from the kitchen clock. But his mother turned away the appraising looks with her own glare, and his father came up behind Tercin as he was telling a tale and slapped him in the head so hard he fell off a bench. Then everyone laughed at him, and someone pointed out that it wouldn’t be a proper Lammas if Tercin Damien didn’t suffer for his mischief. Tercin spat and slouched off with a chicken leg in either hand, no doubt to find Reuben, who never missed a feast or a celebration, but always inhabited the darkness just beyond the reach of the bonfires.

Peter spared a thought for the fires, and how they had a thing or two in common with the burning towers in his dreams, but the vision seemed a hundred years away by then. And when Sara sought him out and lay down next to him, she took up all his attention.

“Peter,” she said. “Do you know what I am thinking?”

“You wanted more sugar on your corn?”

“What? Who puts sugar on their corn?”

“You smelled something foul when you passed by Mr. Hollin’s bottom?”

“No. You’re awful at this game.”

“Reverend Wallop says that only Satan knows the secret thoughts of girls.”

“If you ever listened to the overblowing fool you’d know he says, ‘Only the dark one knows the darkest thoughts of man.’ It’s phrase number seventy-two of the hundred he learned in Bible school. I’ll give you one more try before you lose.”

“And what’s the consequence?”

“Something gruesome and surprising. Once more. .”

“Well,” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “Maybe it’s that. .” He didn’t know what to guess, and he hated games, and he thought it was just bold enough to suggest that maybe she was enjoying herself. Before he could finish, George blew the Lammas horn, summoning boys and girls under the age of sixteen to run the bower. Sara was on her feet and halfway there before Peter was on his knees. “Maybe you are thinking that this is going to be a perfect evening,” he said, and chased after her.

There was only a single torch burning at the center of the bower-maze, not light enough to make more than shadows of the children who were hurriedly picking their way toward the center. Whoever got there first would get a prize. Peter passed Sara when she got trapped in a blind end. “You should have stuck with me,” he said, and she only frowned at him.

He noticed the brightness before anything else. Just when he was ready to break into a run — because he and Edgar Minton had both discovered the right path at the same time — he realized that he could see Edgar’s face very clearly, down to the pattern of freckles that broke over his nose in a shape like the Big Dipper. It was like Edgar’s face had turned into the sun, except it was ten o’clock at night and it had been full dark for two hours already. “Edgar,” he said, “what’s the matter with your face?”

“I know what’s the matter with yours,” Edgar said. “It’s assugly!” And he ran off toward the prize, while the patch of sunlight he abandoned spread over the bower and the field, and blue sky washed out the night.

“Oh no,” Peter murmured, and turned when he heard a hard thump to his left. There was a lady there broken on the ground. Another fell on his right, a man this time — Peter collapsed, sure that he was felled by the rushing flight of something escaping from the man’s body. He had never seen such a thing as a body twisted and ruptured like this, and he wondered if anyone ever had seen such a thing. “Help!” Peter said. “Help him!” But though he was not alone on this day, everyone else around was standing and staring at the burning towers. The maze had grown — it looked a mile across instead of a hundred yards — and the towers stood where the torch had, both shining in the bright sun but only one of them on fire. Here and there Peter saw other boys, Samuel Finch and Caleb Borley and John Sterling, arrested in the maze, hands shading their eyes as they watched the tower burn.

People were still raining out of the sky, but none fell so close to Peter as the first two had, and he couldn’t tell from far away if any of them were his lady. He got up and ran toward one, leaping over the sheaves or just running right through them, violating the law of the maze, but before he ran a few yards, another would fall a little closer, and so he would turn to them, shouting, “Help them!” all the while. He didn’t know how long he continued like that, running all over while everyone else was just standing and watching, until the noise came, something that broke in on the quiet burning, a roar and a scream that seemed the perfect sound to match the singular vision. Just as he was sure no one had ever seen such a thing as a body broken like that man’s, or a tower such as this burning in the sky, certainly no one had ever heard a noise like this. A voice familiar to him cried, “Beware the angel!” When he turned he saw that it was Sara, standing not twenty feet from him, pointing away south, where something enormous was rushing through the sky. He supposed it might have been an angel — surely they were this fast and enormous. It passed over in an instant, and the noise and presence of it pressed him to the ground. With his chest pressed against the bloody grass he lifted his head and saw it collide with the unburnt tower — quietly, its huge noise disappeared into the fire it made. Then the only noise was Sara’s screaming. The night came back in a snap, and only the torch and the bonfires were burning, illuminating a different chaos — twelve children caught in the maze, kneeling and weeping or screaming or trembling violently, their parents holding them or hopping and shouting at their sides. Someone was saying his name, not Sara but his mother, standing next to him. He became aware that her hand was on his shoulder and pushed it away. “That hurts,” he said, because suddenly it did, there was a wild aching there.