On Black Wings (9 page)

“I have nothing to lose, so try me.” I stretch, shifting my wings on my back. If he wanted me dead, I’d be in the ground next to myself by now. You don’t torture someone this much unless you want to prove a point. Or you’re just a sadist. Who knows, he might be both?

“Come and see.” He offers his aged hand to me. “It is within my purveyance to lecture those just starting out in this grand world, for you see, my time with you is like gold, and you should spend it wisely. Come.”

I look at him. His deeply wrinkled face smiles like death itself smiling at me under those spectacles. I oblige, again, there is no point at fighting my nightmares, and I feel it only makes it worse for me. I must be going mad, I surely must.

I take his hand and we walk. It feels good just to walk. Even if it is through the fields of death, they are at least green and pleasant fields of death. We walk through the tombstones, his hand slightly clammy, but it warms to mine as we stroll together.

I don’t know who he is. His clothes seem slightly out of place, hand-stitched, tailored impeccably well, with antiquated little frills, black pearl adornments, and loops here and there. An intricate weave winds its way up the sides of his pants, and the bottoms are oddly cuffed out. There’s some pattern to his boots that I can’t recognize.

He is very, very rich, and also very old. Every movement of his seems carefully budgeted, and he has an air of directness and purpose to his every stride.

We keep walking, his hand still cold, him pulling me along like some harbinger, or some impatient guide taking me to some place. Only I don’t know where. We walk through row after row of tombstones, each row getting slightly more dated and intricate. It feels like the further we walk, the older the cemetery gets.

“Jessica, what do you know of loss?”

He keeps pulling me towards some destination, and I feel the bones under his clammy skin tense and pull at me. I kick at the grass, look down, and then back forward. “A lot more, today.”

“It has been a hard day, but I know not apologies nor sorrow, so I cannot offer any in return.” We keep walking together, and his voice reminds me of my grandfather’s, the same man who wasted away in a nursing home.

Alone.

“I’m not expecting any.” I drop my head, looking at the grass, feeling like a child again as his cold hand pulls me onward. I look out at the graves, thousands of them, so green here, so peaceful and serene, the tombstones even older now, with dates back in the 1700s. Most all of them here are worn away by the ravages of time, the stone worn and old, the names barely recognizable.

His voice is lost, distant. “This is a place of memories.”

“I’ve always hated cemeteries. It’s like the end of your favorite book. It’s over, this place is like a thousand ‘the ends’ to the stories of so many lives.” I shift my wings and shake my head.

“You wonder what they would say, if they could sit here and tell us their stories of yore.” He speaks to the wind, away from me, his ancient voice deep with cracking resonance. “But they are silent. At peace. Perhaps this is the peace you seek?”

I look up at him, but he doesn’t look back. His white hairs blow in the wind, the wrinkles in his face deep, and the light shines across his old and weathered face.

“I don’t seek this.” I look away, feeling my wings fall. “I want to go home.”

I hear him almost laugh, the quick breath of air escaping from his nose. He shakes his head. “Home is so...temporary. Again, a place for temporary memories. In a way, this place is more true than the place you hand a penny to others for so you may rest your head, prepare your meals, or feel like you have a place in this world. Home is sentimental, and sentimentality is a lie.”

“It’s still my home.”

“You don’t see the dead breaking their backs for
these
homes. If you wish true and everlasting peace, that may be granted.”

“I don’t want to die.” I try to pull my hand free, but he squeezes his grip, and leads me on.

“Then you want to suffer, is that not the opposite of death?” He pauses. “Life, this life you say, it is all about toil and suffering. A penny for an ounce of sweat, ten pence for a measure of pain.”

“Then I guess I’m pretty good at it.” I try pulling away again. “Ouch, let go. Where are we going?”

“For a walk.” We slow and he turns. “And a talk. I do not mean to hurt you, but you chose this, in a way. Tell me Jessica, you told me what you know of loss, now what do you know of starvation?”

“Like, not eating?” We walk under a tree, and the shade feels good. Despite us walking, I see no end to the pleasant graveyard we walk through. His grip is still firm and hurtful on my fingers. “I used to starve myself when I was young, to look like the girls in the magazines.”

“It’s so tragic the meanings are lost,” he says, a heavy sigh upon his breath, “we could go a thousand years or even two, and it is all lost upon them like dust to the wind. With every generation, they need to relearn everything. And the meanings themselves of such basic things too, changed by those who wish power and control. It is such a waste, and at times I wonder if the knowledge we meant to pass on ever makes it to the future un-doctored with its true meanings intact.”

“I really don’t have any idea.” I walk alongside him, him almost pulling me along, but I keep up and force myself to match strides with him. “Starvation is starvation.”

He answers with one word, and then falls silent. “Think.”

We walk for a while longer, no words passed between us. He feels like some smart professor pressing me for a point I have no clue about. What do I say? We walk past tombstones with names I don’t even know, important to someone, somewhere. “Starvation? Like them?”

He answers flatly with a sigh. “Humanity.”

“Can we stop?” He nods and lets go of my hand, finally. I rub my sore fingers and lean against a tree, my wings pressing against it. For the first time I’m turning to face him. His presence is imposing, towering over me. “Starving like what? All we use it for is, like, for food. Or attention. And why ask me?”

“You are the one who asked. Remember, I am one with great knowledge and much to pass along, like a gift of gold, only you are squandering it. Again. Mine are the experiences of the way things work, the gears and cogs of society, for I am a man, nay every man, with experience in the workings of such. Let me ask you this, a bit more direct, but-”

He closes his eyes, and then looks down at me. “What would happen if one starved one’s soul?”

“You would get depressed?” I shrug. “Really? You’re not going to like, die or anything.”

“Incorrect. You would die.” He shakes his head. “It would take longer, but you would be just as dead.”

“I haven’t heard about it much on the news. People don’t drop dead because their hopes are ruined. Half the country would never survive an election.”

“Placing your faith in the so-called leaders of men?” His eyes narrow and his voice grows quiet. “Beware the false prophet.”

I shrug and shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

“In time, Jessica, in time you shall understand. For now, understand you are as very much dead as the rest of our friends here in this field.” He holds his hand against his heart, and tilts his head to the side. “Though just not as at peace. You can be dead, but your body still functioning as a soulless husk. You can be very much dead, but very much appearing to be alive. Very much so like those souls in my employ.”

“Wait.” It hits me, and I feel an overwhelming sadness. “It’s me, right? Just like me? I am dead to everyone, right? You think that? You really think that with how much love I had for my kids, Brad, my life and everything I do at work-”

He waits and stands stoic like none of it matters.

“This is you…when you died.”

“Impossible.” I shrink down against the tree, sitting on the ground. “I had kids. I had a life. I had a job and a car and a house-”

“Lost, lost knowledge. The body still functions after it dies,” the strange man says, “the nails and hair may grow, certain things still happen, but parts live on until they get the message the body can no longer support them. It is the same with your soul. You can live on for quite a while being dead in your heart. You function as you always do, and your body still can bring life into the world. What is just yours is already lost. After a while, it catches up with you, and the body will understand there isn’t much there left inside.”

I am so numb to crying I just sniff, it’s too much crazy to accept, but I am certainly not in any sane position to argue otherwise. “You can come back, right? People find reasons to live when all is lost?”

“All can be lost, but they still feed their soul with faith and hope, the will to live for a greater purpose other than self-gratification. To help others, to leave this tired world in a better way than how they came into it, to do that one thing that gives them purpose and keeps the spark of life burning brightly. But coming back? No, you can’t come back, just like the dead cannot walk this Earth without a soul, theirs or something else’s.”

“You’re wrong.” I stare up at him with new-found hatred in my eyes. “My kids were real to me. They brought me back from this, my stupid teenage years, when I wasted my life. You can come back, to be reborn into something better. It’s not all lost when you stop believing.”

He’s silent.

I’m staring at his boots, intricately detailed leather with scenes of death, skulls, and other symbols burned and carved into them. I look up at him. “So what do you want?”

“Here.” He offers his hand and pulls me up. “Jessica. Can you let go? In this life, I need you to accept who you can be, rather than what you were. You keep going back, and that is going to hold you back.”

“I can’t forget those I love.”

He lets out a long breath.

“It pains me because I know how compassion can lead you astray. Still, it does have its uses. I shall need you to let go. And I shall ask you, what if it was to save them?”

I look up at him long and hard. I say nothing, I just stare. The lines on his face stay stoic, cut by the ravages of time, slight spots around his eyes, while strands of his white hair whip in the wind.

“You’re telling me you’re going to save them?” I shake my head. “I find that hard to believe. To you, another for the fields of dead, right? After all I’ve seen, the horrors I’ve been through-”

“Never assume the horrors you’ve been through are the worst ones you could go through.” He almost smiles at the thought, and my stomach turns. “The worst is yet to come. Those are not your children, and they are not your family. Not in this life. Not yet, and maybe never. Not with whom you are, and what you’ve become. You’ve stepped back quite a bit, and I need you now, and not then.”

“You need me why? A man who has-”

The ground shakes and the sound of the sky being torn apart fills the air, like a low rumble coming in over the horizon. It sounds like distant thunder.

Getting closer.

He puts a hand on my chest and pushes me behind him.

“What the hell-”

“Quiet.” He peers off towards a line of trees, staring over hill after rolling hill of tombstones. “Just…be quiet.”

I see it too, it looks like a massive forest fire screaming towards us. The smoke billows up from far away, the center of the fire thunders and blossoms up in a massive fireball, rolling over the hills like a non-stop airliner crash as it eats away hill after hill.

I’ve never seen a wildfire move that fast.

It pounds and thunders as it consumes everything in it’s path, a radiant heat billowing up from whatever was eating its way towards us, I don’t know, a meteor rolling along the ground? But don’t those usually hit and explode? This disaster continues on, getting closer as we start hearing the ripping noise and I make out dozens of trees being thrown hundreds of feet into the air, tossed aside like toothpicks, each tree burning and leaving a billowing path of smoke behind it.

It’s like a massive scar is being dragged into the Earth by a white-hot a piece of the Sun.

I step back. “Jesus Christ.”

“The lamb?” The dark man puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles so loud it rings in my ears. I’m shocked he manages to whistle louder than the oncoming cacophony of destruction. “No, it’s not him.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder, without looking back, and he shoves me away. “Run, run and do not look back.”

“What? Why-”

The fireball of death gets within a mile, and I can feel the heat singe my face. The leaves of the tree above us wither and die.

“You have three days, this I must deal with alone, now run!”

I run. I pound my feet into the grass, pushing by tombstones, gasping and screaming as I feel the heat burn against the skin of my back. My wings too, they grow hot, and I feel my feathers grow lighter as they dry up and I fear they will burn away.

I leave the strange man behind.

What did he mean by three days?

I don’t know, and I don’t care. I need to save myself.

The ground starts to shake, with every footstep, the earthquake of the approaching fireball grows stronger. It feels like standing in front of a train and not being able to run fast enough to get away from it. The heat is unbearable, the headstones around me are bubbling and popping as I run by them, the heat on each one making them smoke like griddles on the fire.

I see a grasshopper on one of them explode like a squeezed grape.

I’m worried I will fall, and I can’t hear anything but the earth being torn in half behind me. I keep running, my hands hitting tombstones and I hear my flesh sizzle as I try to right myself when I stumble. I keep thinking the next moment is my last, that the heat and the sound and the thunder are just too close and this is it.

This is the end.

I keep running, I keep falling, and I pull myself along the nightmare vision of hell into which I am trying to escape.

A burning coffin lands in front of me and explodes, the flaming body falling apart around me. I scream and run past it, and burning coffins strike the ground all around me.

Jesus Christ.

More coffins land, exploding, blocking my path, and I’m dodging them as the fly past me, land in front of me, and some even roll past me, disintegrating as they burn and fly apart. A burning skull bounces past my feet, tumbling and bouncing like a football.