Angel Read online

  Think you’re an angel. You’ll never be an angel. You’ve got no idea what I’ve given you.

  An angel? Angel didn’t believe in angels. But Hunter had taken great glee, apparently, in the fact that Angel was called Angel, when he was giving him a disease, which if what Warren said was true, was going to transform him into an angel.

  An angel? That was simply crazy.

  “Are you there, Angie?”

  “I’m in my room, Mom,” Angel said, and then felt his skin prickle. He got up and walked through the house, expecting to see his mom, but in the dusky twilight, the house was silent and empty.

  Later that night, he decided to call Jason. It was the only number he had left aside from Finn’s, whose number Tomas had insisted on giving him. Tomas wanted Angel to look out for Finn, though something in the brief exchange Angel had had with Finn made him shy away from contacting him.

  And so he called Jason, a guy he barely knew. Still, they had been locked in the same building for three weeks. They’d seen each other every day. It wasn’t as though they were strangers.

  “It’s Angel,” he said.

  “Angel?”

  “From the institute.”

  “Oh — that place. Don’t remind me. I’m trying to put it out of my mind.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “I thought,” Angel said, “that I could maybe come and see you sometime. I’ve got a problem.”

  “Well — sure. Fine. I’m in New York.”

  “New York?”

  “Yeah. Had enough sunshine for one lifetime, and the scene here, it’s mad, man. Men everywhere.”

  Angel nodded.

  “So you want to come out?”

  “Can I get back to you?”

  “Sure. But you know, I could really use a roommate. It’s only a one bedroom place, but we could share the bed. Nothing doing, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah, well, think about it. I really liked you, you know, but you were always off with the in-crowd. And I had a lot of problems with the medication.”

  “Any problems now?”

  “No. All fixed up. Better than ever. Horny as fuck.”

  “Sure — well, I’ve got to move out of this place in three weeks, so yeah, maybe I’ll take you up on the offer. New York, huh? Never thought of living in New York.”

  Angel took a bath. As he slipped into the water it occurred to him that he hadn’t jacked off since leaving the institute. He hadn’t even had a boner as far as he could remember. He frowned, staring at his flaccid cock, which was floating lazily in the soapy water. Perhaps this was yet another side effect. Would he lose all sexual function?

  He slipped his fingers into the water and stroked himself gently, working his fingers tenderly from the base of his cock, along the underside and onto the head. He felt a tickle of sensation as he trailed his fingertips over his eye. He supposed if he worked himself up to it he could probably jack off, but he somehow didn’t feel like it.

  He took a shower to slough off the scum from the bath, and then, exhausted, fell into bed.

  8

  The following day, Angel saw Finn again. Finn was standing in the street, staring at Angel’s house. When Angel opened the door, Finn flinched. He turned away, but when Angel called out to him, he turned back again.

  “Sorry, dude,” Finn said. “I wanted to see you. When I saw you the other day, it was like running into a friend, and well, to be honest, I don’t have much going on in the friend department.”

  “You want to come in?”

  Finn nodded.

  Angel held the door open, glad that he’d cleaned up a little, though the place wasn’t much as far as houses went. Everything — the wallpaper, the carpet, the prints on the walls, the knickknacks, and even the television were hangover’s from the eighties, from when his mom and dad first moved into the place. Nothing had ever changed, and as a kid, Angel had felt ashamed when he brought friends to stay.

  “Well, this is nice,” Finn said. “Real roomy. A proper house. And it sure is cool in here.”

  “I keep it locked up. I can’t stand the sun.”

  “I thought you were a surfer.”

  “Yeah. Like I said. I’ve given it up. I’ve got some sort of … problem. Something with the pigmentation of my skin.”

  “You sure look pale.”

  Angel nodded.

  “You been seeing the psychs?” Finn said.

  “The psychs?”

  “About the institute. They seem to think I have some sort of problem. Being locked in my room for so long, and no one taking any notice of me. All I had was Tomas, really, and now he’s gone.”

  They’d offered Angel counseling, but he’d refused it, and he told Finn this.

  Finn nodded. “Looks like they really did a number on me. Had me set up for some special sort of treatment. Something they were testing out.” Finn glanced at the painting above the fireplace, a print of Munch’s The Scream.

  “I hardly ever saw you.”

  “Yeah. They had me locked in my room. Locked in there with slime. Naked. And they were feeding me custard.”

  “Custard?”

  “Yeah. That’s all I ever got. That sick fuck Umberto watching me on his cameras, and if it wasn’t for Tomas, coming along and seeing me every day, I think I would have cracked.”

  Angel nodded and there was an uncomfortable pause. “You want a tea or coffee?”

  “A soda’d be great, if you’ve got one.”

  “Sure. Sprite or Coke?” Angel said, once he’d walked through to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

  “Sprite.”

  “You want ice?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Angel made himself a cup of coffee, not that he really wanted one, but he felt awkward with Finn. He hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with him during the trial. They’d spoken at the beginning, and they’d ridden to the station together on the day everything blew up. But still, they hardly knew one another. Finn was some kind of nut, according to Joel. Sick in some way, Joel had said. Perverted.

  Angel took him out onto the terrace and immediately regretted it. The bright midday sunshine was overwhelming. He winced against the glare, and then, after excusing himself, walked back into the now dark house to find his sunglasses.

  Finn was bending forward, fondling the foliage of a begonia, and as Angel stepped through the door, he was suddenly struck by how handsome Finn was. He was wearing a pair of lime green shorts, cut high, and Angel couldn’t help admiring the graceful curve that swelled behind his thighs, only to sink inward, beneath the hem of the shorts. His ass was firm and narrow, the shorts thin, and beneath them Angel could make out the line of Finn’s briefs, one side of which had gathered itself into the cleft of his ass.

  Angel took a seat at the table and Finn turned.

  “What’s this?” he said, a leaf of the plant between his fingertips.

  “A begonia.”

  Finn nodded. He turned his attention to the flower again, and then, reluctantly it seemed, straightened and took a seat beside Angel, his blond hair blazing in the sunshine. He grinned, glanced at the oak, at the swimming pool, and then lifted the glass of Sprite to his lips and took a tentative sip.

  It had rained during the night, and the smell of damp foliage was overwhelming in the midday heat.

  “You sure are lucky to have a place like this,” Finn said. “My place is a hole.”

  “It’s not mine,” Angel said. “It was my mother’s. But she’s dead. Died while we were locked up in that place, and now, well, they’re selling it. I’ve got three weeks. Then I’m going to New York.”

  “New York?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wouldn’t mind going back to New York.”

  “You used to live there?”

  “Yeah. Lived there most of last year.”

  Angel nodded. He blew on his coffee and took a sip.

  “If you’ve got a place there, w
ell, maybe we could share it.” Finn lifted his eyebrows. “Or if you’re looking — if you’d like to find a two-room place.”

  “I’m moving in with Jason.”

  “Oh — right. Jason.”

  Finn turned and stared at Angel for a moment, his clear gray eyes glimmering with moisture. He placed his glass on the table and ran a finger beneath the lid of his right eye.

  Was he crying?

  “If it doesn’t work out with Jason,” Angel said, wondering where this was coming from and why he was saying it, “then maybe you and I could find a place together.”

  “You got my number?”

  Angel said no, that he hadn’t, and when they went inside he wrote it on a piece of paper. He had keyed it into his phone when Tomas gave it to him, but Angel didn’t want to tell Finn that, or that Tomas had asked him to look out for Finn. Really, Angel wasn’t sure he liked Finn very much.

  After a brief tour through the house they were saying goodbye, though Angel had somehow been drawn into making a date with Finn to see a movie tomorrow evening.

  When Finn left, he shut the door and stood silently in the hall. He felt unsettled now. In the kitchen, he rinsed the mug and the glass, but carelessly, and perhaps because he was feeling for some reason angry, he broke the glass. A shard cut his finger, spearing it, and he swore. The clatter of glass screeched against the stainless steel as he slid the broken pieces out of the running water and onto the drain board. Then he turned his attention to his finger. He drew the shard from it, frowned over how such a tiny thing could have caused so much pain, and then found himself staring, fixated, at the blood dripping from his hand. It appeared to be black, or a very deep shade of red. He blinked, closed his eyes and held still for a moment, but when he opened his eyes again, the blood was swirling in the still running water, looking just as dark now as it had done.

  9

  Finn liked foreign films, and he took Angel to see Cold Showers, which was showing at a run-down theater in the Grange. Afterwards, as they were sitting over coffee at a diner opposite the theater, Finn said that Angel looked like Clement, the dark-haired boy in the film, or he thought so.

  Angel smiled hesitantly, embarrassed at being compared to someone so attractive. He stared at his coffee, stirring it lazily before lifting his eyes to Finn. Finn was leaning sideways into the corner of the booth, with one arm stretched along the back of the seat. He was staring at Angel intently, his gray eyes as pale as water, his lips pregnant with a smile, perhaps, or it might as easily have been a sneer.

  He was extraordinarily attractive. They both were. And Angel was suddenly conscious of this.

  All the guys who’d taken part in the trial had been attractive, vetted as they were by Umberto. Finn, like Joel, had stood out from the crowd at the institute. He wasn’t particularly tall or particularly well-built, but he had good muscle definition and the most extraordinary face. Now, in the harsh light of the diner, his gray eyes reflected light, giving him a slightly ethereal look, his fine blond hair adding to the impression of otherworldliness, as though he might have been a fairy, though as Angel thought this, he choked on his coffee and had to thump his chest, startled by thought of how Finn’s personality and the idea of him being a fairy clashed.

  “Went down the wrong way,” he said.

  Finn frowned.

  “I was thinking — you look like a fairy.”

  “A fairy?”

  “Like something not of this world. Ethereal.”

  “Paranormal.”

  “Paranormal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “What?”

  “Paranormal.”

  “You said I looked ethereal.”

  “Yeah, but why would you say ‘paranormal’?” And now that Angel turned it over again, he had the impression Finn had said it on purpose.

  “Your disease,” Finn said.

  “You know about that?”

  “Tomas told me.” Finn glanced over his shoulder as a girl entered the diner. She was dressed in a pale blue sweater and a white skirt. Finn watched her carefully as she passed them, and as Angel followed her with his eyes he had the impression that she was dogged by a shadow, a fleeting impression, one that barely registered until a few moments later. “But I knew anyway,” Finn said. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “You’ve seen — what?”

  “What you’ve got,” Finn said, turning his eyes on Angel again.

  “And what is that?”

  “They call it the divine plague.”

  “They? Who is they?”

  “People I know. You wouldn’t know them.”

  “Well — could I meet them?” Angel thrust his coffee away. “I mean — is there something that can be done?”

  “When you go into the dark.”

  “Into the dark?”

  Finn nodded.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means stepping out of this,” Finn said, waving vaguely at the diner. “You see these people? You see that couple over there, in their sixties and still in love? You see that girl who just walked in?”

  Angel turned and glanced around the diner. There were perhaps ten or fifteen people in the place. It was quiet, a weekday evening. He frowned, wondering what he was supposed to see.

  Finn leaned forward, hesitated, and then said, “They aren’t dark, and they never will be, but when you go into the dark, when you get really immersed in it, well, people like these might as well not exist.

  “There’s another world, you see, right under this one, right alongside it. You see a beggar by the roadside, you see a bag lady, you see a junkie hanging out for a fix. Those people touch the dark. They know where it is. But there are others who live in the dark by choice.”

  Finn glanced over Angel’s shoulder and winced.

  “You see the boyfriend?”

  “The boyfriend?” Angel said.

  “Came in with the girl.”

  Angel turned and jolted at the sight of a dark-haired guy with sallow skin sitting alongside the girl in the booth and toying with her hair. The girl seemed barely aware of him, though as the guy looked up and caught Angel’s eye, he grinned. He held Angel’s eye for a moment, as though sharing a secret joke. Then he leaned forward and bit the girl on the neck, a love bite, perhaps, though she writhed away from him.

  Casually, the guy lifted a glass and smashed it on the edge of the table. A ripple of apparent confusion passed through the diner as people turned at the sound of breaking glass, though it was something passing, apparently, a sound they might have imagined.

  The guy lifted his eyes to Angel’s again and Angel swallowed. Momentarily, he felt as though he were spinning forward into a tunnel, as though he were being lured into a nightmare. He stumbled to his feet and turned to the booth, staring at the guy, as though at some bizarre form of insect life that only grew stranger the closer he looked. The guy’s hair was askew and filthy; his skin had a yellow tinge; his eyes were bloodshot and his teeth rotting. A shiver passed through Angel’s body, a kind of instinctive reaction to horror, and he felt wretched.

  Yet still, he watched spellbound as the guy turned the shattered base of the tumbler in his hands. He lifted his eyes to Angel and grinned again, and then, as though for Angel’s benefit, moved swiftly. With one hand he gripped a fistful of the girl’s hair. With the other, he ripped backwards, a movement Angel followed, though a moment passed before he realized the girl’s throat had been slashed. She brought her hand to her neck, her fingers hooked in the wound, then managed to stumble to her feet only to collapse into the corner of the booth. Her head hit the table with a clatter of cutlery, and at this sound, again everyone turned.

  For a moment, they stared in horror. As though mesmerized, they watched the man rise to his feet.

  “Now, he is dark,” Finn said, though his voice seemed to be coming from miles away. “Watch now,” he said. “Watch, and you should be able to see it.”

>   The guy lifted his hands, as though he were the conductor of an orchestra. He held still, daring, apparently, any of the diners to challenge him.

  “Nothing to see here,” he said. “Nothing to see-eee.”

  As he drew out the word, Angel glimpsed a couple of tentative, confused smiles. There was a further moment of silence, a moment in which time might have stopped, and then suddenly, it was all over. The other diners were speaking again. There was a clatter of plates and glasses, and a waitress, who had frozen in the corner, now returned to the counter.

  “Watch,” Finn was saying, and now Angel realized he’d missed something. The guy had turned and was leaning over the table. “You see the way he’s moving his hands over her? You see her body?”

  Angel nodded, his mouth agape. She seemed to be … shimmering. He glimpsed blood spurt from the girl’s neck, had the impression that she had moved, and then saw that she was moving, collapsing into herself as if she were a blow up doll that had been pierced. She glittered. After which followed a brief flash of light. Then she was simply gone, as though her image had flashed momentarily in a mirror, as though she had only been passing.

  The guy grabbed a red letter jacket he’d slung over the back of the booth. He turned to Angel and smirked, wanting to know, apparently, if he had enjoyed the show. He winked at Finn, and as he passed, put a hand on Angel’s shoulder.

  Angel fell into his chair, ill with grief. Bile rose into his throat and he gulped it down before shuddering violently at the coldness of the guy’s hand, which seemed even now to be coursing through him. He lifted his head to the booth again, sure he’d imagined all of it, and he might as well have done. The waitress was wiping the table down, though whether she was wiping blood or crumbs he couldn’t now tell.

  He turned to Finn, who had his eyes closed. He looked as though he were enduring some enormous physical pain, yet when he opened them again, he offered Angel the semblance of a smile.

  “Welcome to the dark,” he said.

  10

  Angel staggered onto the street with Finn close behind him. He’d parked three or four blocks away, yet the street seemed strangely unfamiliar. A cold wind was blowing. Litter was scuttering along the sidewalk. A video store, which had been brightly lit when they entered the cafe, had its shutters down and was covered in graffiti. He passed a row of tenement houses, some of the windows smashed and a vile smell emenating from within. When he saw his Honda, he took off, hurrying toward it as though it were a lifeline.