Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

The Archangel turned towards us. Francesco lowered his head and made the sign of the cross. I kept my head up, my eyes focused. Unlike Francesco, because I had never longed to see the divine, I was not burdened with the fear of what might happen if I did.

Michael smiled.

I realized then, for the first time, that I was not hallucinating. I was indeed in Hell, and I was indeed in the presence of the Divine. It was beyond all doubt: I am far too human to imagine anything like that smile. It was like a kiss upon all my worst secrets, absolving them straight away.

With a single sweep of his wings, Michael took flight again, twisting like an immediate tornado that sprang up from the ground. Behind him trailed the colors that he had brought, sucking upwards to disappear in his wake. The too-green of the grass was replaced once again with the dull gray of mud. The health of the trees was leached out. The gates rusted over instantly, but were left open. The colors disappeared like bathwater running to the drain, except that the drain was in the sky. Where Michael disappeared, the last of the colors followed him through a tiny hole in Hell’s awning.

When Francesco finally found his voice, after several stunned minutes, he said, “You must walk through the gates alone.”

I shook Francesco’s hand. It felt such an insufficient gesture, and I told him that I didn’t know how to thank him.

“It is I,” Francesco answered, “who must thank you. It was not only for Marianna that I took this task; it was also repayment.”

“For what?”

“My father was an archer named Niccolo, who was killed while serving in a German condotta. But his friend Benedetto escaped with the help of two German archers, and he brought my father’s crossbow to Firenze.” Francesco, at this point, clasped my hands in his. “That bow was all I ever knew of my father.”

“My copy of Inferno belonged to your father?”

“Yes. He would want you to have it.” Francesco bowed deeply. “Grazie.”

The Rebellious Angels dared not stop me as I walked through the gates. I knew what I was supposed to find next: the Sixth Circle, the home of the Heretics, littered with graves and tombs ringed with fire. But the moment I walked through the gates, I found myself no longer in Francesco’s Inferno. Instead, I emerged on a cliff overlooking an ocean. When I spun around to look behind me, the gates of Dis had disappeared.

Gulls cut over the water with happy squawks. The grass was tinged with cool dew and I could feel every blade tickle the skin of my feet. I was now entirely naked, my skin fully healed; the clothing that I had been wearing was gone, and I no longer had my coin necklace. It was dawn, the breeze cooled me, and I felt wonderfully alive.

Perhaps two hundred feet away on the cliff, a solitary figure stood motionless, looking out over the ocean. Of course I knew who it was. As I drew closer, I saw that she appeared to be in her mid-forties but that there was something infinitely older in her expression, as she squinted over the miles of water. Her hair was pinned to the back of her head, and her shawl was draped over her shoulders, held tightly closed at her bosom. Her dress was worn at the hem and there was dirt on her boots. I spoke her name. “Vicky.”

“Yes.” Her eyes never wavered from their nautical discipline.

“Do you see him?”

“I see him everywhere.”

I looked out towards the horizon. There were no boats on the ocean. There was only the long, lonely expanse of water.

I asked, gently, “Do you think Tom is coming back?”

“Do you think that’s why I stand here?”

“I don’t know.”

A strand of hair unwound from the pin at the back of Vicky’s head. She tucked it back into place. “Of course it is.”

The breeze rustled her dress against her legs. Waves crashed over the rocks below us. For a long time, we did not say a word. I was thinking that I must be nearing the end of my Hellish journey. This is the final ghost. We stood there, commanding that lonely post at the edge of the world, each waiting for something over which we had no power.

“You don’t have the burning arrow,” Vicky said, finally. She was correct. I had left it behind at the gates of Dis, plugged into the ground as my makeshift altar. Perhaps it was burning still, a testament to the fact that I had been there. “It’s no matter. You won’t need it here.”

“What do I do next?”

“Maybe it’s your time to wait too.” She dug the heels of her boots firmly into the ground and set her shoulders more stiffly against the sea breeze. “Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.”

In this moment, I was allowed to glance into the grand nothingness of her existence: she really would stand forever, awaiting Tom’s return. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t even noticed my nakedness. I doubted that she noticed anything other than the promise of the water that stretched in front of her.

“This is not my place,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“I think I’ll head inland.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the sea. “Good luck.”

There was something about the way she wished me luck that I didn’t understand-until I took my first steps. I felt the ground tremble as if something were happening behind me, under me, all around me. I momentarily wondered whether it was the return of Michael, until I saw that the edge of the cliff was shifting. Afraid that it would collapse beneath me, I bolted. There was the tremendous crack of rock breaking away and I churned my legs as quickly as I could. When I looked over my shoulder, I expected to see the cliff falling away behind me.

But the cliff had not fallen away. Its edge was following me, always the same distance behind despite the fact that I was now running. I felt the familiar swish in my spine. I AM HERE.

My first thought was that I might have been running in place, on a sort of soil treadmill, but this was not the case. When I say the edge of the cliff was following me, I mean that literally. The stone constantly changed its shape to stalk me, keeping pace so that I never moved any farther from the precipice. When I veered to one side, the cliff circled like a well-trained sheepdog. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I ran for as long as I could, darting this way and that, but the cliff was unrelenting. It doesn’t matter how fast you move, I learned, if you never go anywhere. YOU CANNOT LEAVE.Soon I recognized that I was not in any immediate danger. If the cliff were going to swallow me, it would have done so already. I headed back to where Vicky was standing.

“I tried to leave once too,” she said, “and the cliff followed me.”

“That’s why you stand here?”

“No.”

I looked over the edge of the cliff, to see that at its bottom were rocks that could shred a person.

“If you jump,” Vicky whispered, as if worried that the very stone under our feet would overhear, “you’ll lose the skin that you have regrown and be put back in your burnt body.”

“But this is only a hallucination. None of this is real.”

She shrugged. “Is that what you learned from the Archangel’s smile?”

YOU SHOULD JUMP.

Why would the snake tell me to jump? To cause me pain. That was in the interest of the snake, because the bitch thrived on my pain. I touched my skin where the nerve endings had once been incinerated.

If I jump, I thought, I lose this. I lose my nerves and my hair and my health and my beauty. My fingers and penis will recede again. My face will become weathered granite. My lips will wither, and my voice will be ground back into sharp ugly bits. I’ll become the gargoyle again, but this time by my own choice.