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She turned, pushing the door closed behind her as she did.
When she looked up, her heart jumped to her throat. “Good Lord,” she exclaimed as she realized she was not alone. Another man sat in the partial shadow that fell on her nana’s old chair, her lover’s “throne.” Her pulse beat in her neck, even after she recognized the face, even after all sense of danger had passed. “Pastor Jones,” she said, relieved, confused, taking a few steps closer to the man she hadn’t seen in years. “You frightened me.” She smiled, pressing her hand over her heart. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She flushed with embarrassment, wondering just how much he had witnessed of her argument with Guy.
“I was called here,” he said, the words coming out quiet and flat. His voice sounded odd, like it was reaching to her from a great distance.
“Called?” she said, but he gave no further explanation. She took a closer look at him.
At first glance, he seemed to be in good shape. His clothes appeared clean and neatly pressed, his well-blocked hat rested on his knee. Still she could see there was something wrong with the man. Too quiet. Too still. Shell-shocked, that was the term that came to mind—his gaze was both blank and fixed at the same time, like he’d seen horrors he couldn’t look away from, even though they were no longer before him. He looked up at her through wide and haunted eyes. “They aren’t angels,” he said. “They never were.”
NINE
“They aren’t angels,” the pastor repeated himself.
Jilo crossed and knelt before him. “Are you all right? Can I get you something? Some water?” He didn’t respond. He just sat there staring straight ahead. “Does Mrs. Jones know you’re here? Does she know you’re all right?” Jilo tried to remember the boarding house’s phone number. Would it still ring? Had Mrs. Jones managed to hold on, or had she lost everything, going to drift in the wind? Jilo felt guilt flood her. She should’ve done a better job of keeping in touch.
“ ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” It unnerved her to look at him, his words were spoken with such intensity, but his body remained still, unmoving, other than an occasional dart of his gaze. “They aren’t angels. Not at all. They’re devils. That’s what they are. They killed me, my girl. Took me, then broke me apart piece by piece, looking to see what made me tick.”
“No, no,” Jilo tried to comfort him. “You’re all right. You’re fine. You’re right here with me.” The light in the room began to dim. At first she was so fixated on the pastor, she didn’t notice, but soon it was impossible to ignore. The room had darkened from full daylight to an unnatural twilight within a matter of seconds. She cast an eye at the window, afraid that they might be in the path of a sudden oncoming storm.
The window was black. Not like the weather had turned. Like it had been painted over. Jilo rose and crossed the room, approaching the window with caution. As she drew near, the entire wall began to darken, a stain spreading out in all directions from the window, like a bruise, changing the w
all’s color from its customary lead white to a deep indigo, from indigo to a midnight blue.
The darkness began to sweat through the plaster of the wall, beading up and dripping down the windowpane. Jilo stumbled back, her heart once again pounding to escape her chest. She turned to the pastor. “We have to get out of here. I don’t know what this is, but we need to move.” It struck her that she’d just told a lie. She knew what this was. Magic.
He didn’t stir, but remained staring at some invisible point six feet or so before him. “I didn’t know you were mine. I don’t think Betty knew it either.”
Jilo had no idea what he meant, but there wasn’t time to listen. She lunged forward to grab his hand, to tug him out of the chair and away from whatever was happening there. Her fingers bent to scoop up his hand in hers, but they passed right through him. A cry escaped her lips, and she jumped back from him, uncertain of which way to turn. He seemed to take no notice of her panic. She spun and ran toward the door, only to find that it, and the wall surrounding it, had also begun to change color. The darkness was bleeding through the wall, bubbling up through its surface like drops of ink. She stepped back in horror.
“It wasn’t like with me.” The pastor’s voice caused her to turn back. “They only took her the one time.” She slid around him, keeping her back against the unsullied side wall. “I never lay with her. I never touched her. But somehow they created you. From the two of us. Betty must have thought it was only a dream.” A bead of darkness broke free from the wall, taking flight on buzzing iridescent wings. Then another, and another. The wall appeared to bow in as the droplets took life and broke free. A swarm of insects, the likes of which Jilo had never seen before, neither bee nor wasp nor dragonfly, but some unholy combination of all three, spiraled around her. She began swatting at the winged intruders in wild panic, but every time her hands came into contact with one, a sharp pop, like a burst of static electricity, shocked her.
“They’ll want you now, if they see you have magic,” the pastor’s voice cut through the swarm’s buzz, capturing their attention as it did. The creatures seemed to lose all interest in her, coalescing instead around the pastor, drowning out what remained of his nonsense words, forming a spinning and ever-constricting cloud around him.
The cloud settled on him, concealing him, consuming him, then one by one the insects began to break away from the mass, each creature snatching away a bit of gauzelike substance as it disengaged from its mates. Bright pinpoints of light broke through the remaining swarm as its individual members took flight, like they were peeling away the pastor’s exterior and exposing the spirit that lay beneath.
A part of Jilo’s brain ordered her to move. To flee the front room, run down the hall, and make her way through the kitchen and out the back door, but she remained frozen in place until a light flared up from the center of where the pastor had been, a spark of white light that rose from the swarm and shot straight up through the ceiling. In that same instant, the light in the room returned. The swarm was gone.
The door began shaking as if someone were trying to force an entry. Jilo bolted down the hall, intent on making it out the back way, only to freeze in the entryway to the kitchen. She wasn’t alone. There were four others sitting at her table. A man wearing a top hat decorated with a bright red satin band was facing her. Something about him seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place what it was. “Little sister,” he called, “come join us.” He raised a glass in salute.
To this man’s right sat another with jaundiced white skin so thin the light seemed to pass right through it, giving him the look of a skeleton wrapped in fine vellum.
In spite of her earlier impression that there were four at the table, Jilo realized that the chair to the right of the fellow in the top hat sat empty. Then her eyes spied the flicker of a shadow, and that flicker solidified for an instant into the figure of a man so dark, so lusterless, that it was impossible to discern any features. In the next moment, the figure was again gone, replaced by a flat shadow that draped itself over the chair.
The fourth figure was facing away from Jilo. From the back, she had the succinct impression of maleness, but when the visitor turned, his wide shoulders seemed to narrow and soften. His skin darkened, and his bald pate covered over with dark hair. “Yes, little sister,” his baritone voice rose with each syllable, ending in a high alto, “come.” Jilo found herself looking into her own face. The room seemed to sway around her as memories—no, these were more than memories, it was as if she were reliving each experience, fresh, present, and real—of her every sadness, failure, and defeat weighed down on her. It seemed as if all hope had drained from her soul in an instant.
“Stop it, Brother,” said the man in the top hat—she still thought of this creature as a man, though only due to his appearance, which was more normal than that of his peers—causing her imitator to turn. The visitor shifted in appearance as it looked away from her, gaining in both height and girth, its skin lessening in pigment, its hair retracting inward, leaving nothing but a snowy bald pate. “This one is not for you,” the man in the hat continued. “At least not until she has accomplished what we need of her.”
“What you need . . . ?” The words squeaked out from her, but she had no sooner begun to speak them than the world around her began to change. Before her very eyes, the walls of the kitchen unfolded, peeling down and away, exposing the world around them. Soon the kitchen had disappeared, and the entire house seemed to dissolve and retract, sinking beneath the earth. Without moving an inch, Jilo found herself beneath the wide sky, looking out on her backyard. Only the table and chairs with their weird occupants remained—any other evidence of the house that had sheltered her family for decades had been erased, and although her feet told her that a solid floor remained beneath them, her eyes swore to her that she and her visitors floated at least a yard above the earth.
Jilo noticed a movement, just at the edge of the tree line. A figure stepped out from the grove of live oaks, her movements as graceful as the steps of a dance. Covered head to toe in lace, this odd woman—Jilo thought of the creature as female because of its dress and sashaying movements—began drawing near, holding her gloved hands overhead and slightly behind her. Her fingers wiggled, like she meant to tickle the sky. The sun followed her as she crossed the dry, gray field, so as she came closer, morning passed to high noon, and noon passed to dusk, the sun scraping the sky red as the figure in lace teased it along behind her. This can’t be real. This can’t be the real world. Dreaming. I must be dreaming. The sight of twilight approaching on the horizon caused Jilo’s thoughts to turn to Robinson. In the real world, was the sun also setting? Would her boy be crying? Was he worried about his mama? For the first time, Jilo wondered if the everyday world was permanently lost to her. Had she somehow died and found her way, if not to hell itself, at least to some kind of purgatory? Were these creatures the same ones Pastor Jones had believed to be angels?
The veiled creature stopped mere feet from her and howled with laughter. “No, child, we’re not angels. I’ve never even seen one of those things.” She did a final twirl, the lace of her veil and of her skirt flitting up as she did. “What do you think?” she said, though now she seemed to be addressing the man in the top hat. Without waiting for him to answer, she extended a hand toward him, not in greeting, but as an impatient signal for him to hand her the bottle he held. He rose and offered it to her. Only then did Jilo realize the creature most resembling a normal man was the only one of the four remaining; the other three had disappeared from their chairs with no notice, as if they had been unwilling, or perhaps unable, to remain in the presence of the veiled one.
“You ever see one?” The woman whisked back the veil, revealing an even more absolute void than Jilo’s soul could have ever imagined. Not even a spark of light lived there. She swiped the bottle away, tilting it back to where Jilo reasoned her lips would be, were she not an abyss bound up in lace.
“No, can’t say that I have,” the man said, “though maybe they exist in the hidden places in between.”
For a moment, absolute silence fell all around them. Then the female lowered the bottle, hissing like an angry cat as she let her veil fall back over the emptiness. “Do not speak to me of the hidden places.” She hurled the bottle at the man with such force that it shattered against him. “My piss fills your hidden places.” The man stepped back, trembling, and the veiled one spun back toward Jilo. “These bastards. It pleases them to know there are things that remain hidden, even to me. But those things are few”—she stopped and turned again on her companion—“and oh, so very far between.” The man stood frozen in place, seeming to be too terrified to move, until the creature once again turned her attention from him to Jilo.
