Angels! Read online

  She could almost see his workshop in front of her, the gears and chains and hinges, the tall wooden cabinets filled with hands and silver hair, tin stars, carved dogs, and trumpets. The king and queen lay on their sides like fallen wooden angels, wearing robes of silk and gauze, and wooden crowns with gaudy paste jewels. The bird hung from the ceiling, waiting for its place inside the magician's box. All around Alfred apprentices were cutting into wood, or doing something incomprehensible with pieces of machinery. She thought that she could even smell the wood; it had the elusive scent of great trees, like a forest from a childhood fairy tale.

  She turned back to Alfred. What had happened? The day had grown cold; she saw the sun set through the trees, dazzling her vision. "I've got to go home," she said. "I'll be late for dinner."

  "Oh. I hope I have not bored you terribly. I don't get much of a chance to talk."

  "No," she said. "Oh, no."

  She hurried down the path, shivering in the first real cold of the year. Once she looked back but Alfred had vanished among the shadows of the trees and the carousel.

  Her parents and Joey were already eating dinner when she got home. "Where do you go on Fridays?" her mother said as she sat down. "Doesn't Laura have her Girl Scout meeting today?"

  "I don't go anywhere," Alison said.

  "You know you're not supposed to be late for dinner. And what about your homework?"

  "Come on, Mom—it's Friday."

  "That's right, it's Friday. Remember how long it took you to do your math homework last week? If you start now you'll have it done on time."

  "We didn't get very much. I can do the whole thing on Sunday." "Can you? I want to see it after dinner."

  Her father looked at her mother. Sometimes Alison thought her father might be on her side in the frequent arguments she had with her mother, but that he didn't feel he had the right to interrupt. Now he laughed and said to her mother, "What would you know about math homework? You told me you didn't understand anything past addition and subtraction."

  "Well, then, you look at it," her mother said. "I want to make sure she gets it done this time. And maybe you can ask her where she goes after school. I don't think she's telling me the truth."

  Alison looked down at her plate. What did her mother know? Sometimes she made shrewd guesses based on no evidence at all. She said nothing.

  "Mrs. Smith says she saw you talking to an old man in the park," her mother said.

  Alison didn't look up. Didn't Mrs. Smith have anything better to do than spy on everyone in the neighborhood?

  "When I was your age I knew enough not to talk to strangers," her mother said. "The Gestapo came after my father—did I ever tell you that?"

  Alison nodded miserably. She didn't want to hear the story again.

  "They came to our house in Germany and asked for my father," her mother said. "I was twelve or thirteen then, just about your age. This was before they started sending Jews to the camps without a reason, and someone had overheard my father say something treasonous about Hitler. My mother said my father wasn't home.

  "But he was home—he was up in the attic, hiding. What do you think would have happened if I'd talked to the Gestapo the way you talk to this man in the park? If I'd said, `Oh, yes, Officer, he's up in the attic'? I was only twelve and I knew enough not to say anything. You kids are so stupid, so pampered, living here."

  It wasn't the same thing, Alison thought, realizing it for the first time. Germany and the United States weren't the same countries. And Alfred had been in the camps too; he and her mother were on the same side. But she felt the weight of her mother's experience and couldn't say anything. Her mother had seen so much more than she had, after all.

  "We escaped to Holland, stayed with relatives," her mother said. "And eight years later the Nazis invaded Holland and took us to concentration camps. My father worked for a while as an electrician, but finally he died of typhus. All of that, and he died anyway."

  Her mother's voice held the bitterness Alison had heard all her life. Now she sighed and shook her head. Alison wanted to do

  something for her, to make everything all right. But what could she do, after all? She was only twelve.

  She took the bus back to the park the next day. Alfred sat on his usual bench, his eyes closed and turned toward the sun. She dropped down on the bench next to him.

  "Tell me a story," she said.

  He opened his eyes slowly, as if uncertain where he was. Then

  he smiled. "You look sad," he said. "Did something happen?" "Yeah. My mother doesn't want me to talk to you anymore." "Why not?"

  This was tricky. She couldn't say that her mother had compared him to the Gestapo. She couldn't talk about the camps at all with him; she never wanted to hear that note of bitterness and defeat come into his voice. Alfred was hers, her escape from the fears and sadness she had lived with all her life. He had nothing to do with what went on between Alison and her mother.

  He was looking at her with curiosity and concern now, expecting her to say something. "It's not you. She doesn't trust most people," Alison said.

  "Do you know why?"

  "Yeah." His eyes were deep brown, she noticed, like hers, like her mother's. Why not tell him, after all? "She—she has a number on her arm. Like yours."

  He nodded.

  "And she—well, she went through a bad time, I guess." It felt strange to think of her mother as a kid. "She said the Gestapo came after her father when she was my age. She said he had to hide in the attic."

  To her surprise Alfred started to nod. "I bet it was crowded in that attic too. Boxes and boxes of junk—I bet they never threw anything away. Probably hot too. But then who knew that someday someone would have to hide in it?"

  At first his words made no sense whatsoever. Then she said, slowly, "You're him, aren't you? You're her father. My—my grandfather." The unfamiliar word felt strange on her tongue.

  "What?" He seemed to rouse himself. "Your grandfather? I'm a crazy old man you met in the park."

  "She said he died. You died. You're a ghost." She was whispering now. Chills kept coming up her spine, wave after wave of them. The sun looked cold and very far away.

  He laughed. "A ghost? Is that what you think I am?"

  She nodded reluctantly, not at all certain now.

  "Listen to me," he said. "You're right about your mother—she went through a bad time. And it's hard for her to understand you, to understand what you're going through. Sometimes she's jealous of you."

  "Jealous?"

  "Sure, jealous. You never had to distrust people, or hide from them. You never went hungry, or saw anyone you loved killed. She thinks it's easy for you—she doesn't understand that you have problems too."

  "She called me stupid. She said I would have talked to the Gestapo, would have told them where my father was. But I never would have done that."

  "No. It was unfair of her to say that. She wants you to think of the world the way she does, as an unsafe place. But you have to make up your own mind about what the world is like."

  She was nodding even before he had finished. "Yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought, only I couldn't say it. Because she's been through so much more than I have, so everything she thinks seems so important. I couldn't tell her that what happens to me is important too."

  "No, and you might never be able to tell her. But you'll know it, and I'll know it too."

  "What was your father's name?" Alison asked her mother that night at dinner. Joey stopped eating and gave her a pleading look; he was old enough to know that she was taking the conversation in a dangerous direction.

  "Alfred," her mother said. "Why do you ask?"

  There were probably a lot of old men named Alfred running around. Did she only think he was her grandfather because she wanted what Laura had, wanted someone to tell her family stories, to connect her with her past?

  "Oh, I don't know," she said, trying to keep her voice casual. "I was wondering about him, that's all. Do you have a p
icture of him?"

  "What do you think—we were allowed to take photographs with us to the camps?" The bitterness was back in her mother's voice. "We lost everything."

  "Well, what did he look like?"

  "He was—I don't know. A thin man, with black hair. He brushed it back, I remember that."

  "Did he wear glasses?"

  Her mother looked up at that. "Yah, he did. How did you know?"

  "Oh, you know," Alison said quickly. "Laura's grandfather has glasses, so I thought . . . What did he do?"

  "I named you after him," her mother said. "I wanted a name that started with A." To Alison's great astonishment, she began to laugh. "He told that story about the attic all the time, when we lived in Holland. How crowded it was. He said my mother never threw anything away." She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. "He made it sound like the funniest thing that ever happened to him."

  Alison walked slowly through the park. It was Sunday and dozens of families had come out for the last warmth of the year, throwing frisbees, barbecuing hamburgers in the fire pits. Joey held her hand tightly, afraid to let go.

  She began to hurry, pushing her way through the crowds. Had she scared Alfred off by guessing his secret? She knew what he was now. He had drifted the way Laura's grandfather sometimes drifted, had forgotten his own time and had slipped somehow into hers. Or maybe this was the one wish the angel had granted him, the wish he hadn't known he wanted. However it had happened he had come to her, singled her out. She had a grandfather after all.

  But what if she was wrong? What if he was just a lonely old man who needed someone to talk to?

  There he was, up ahead. She ran toward him. "Hey," Joey said anxiously. "Hey, wait a minute."

  "Hi," Alison said to the old man, a little breathless. "I've decided to tell you my name. My name's Alison, and I was named after my grandfather Alfred. And this is my brother, Joey. Joey's afraid of things. I thought you might talk to him."

  A Plethora of Angels

  by

  Robert Sampson

  The late Robert Sampson was a veteran pulp-era author who had sold to Planet Stories and Weird Tales, and who, toward the end of his life, retired from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and began to revitalize his career with a number of sales to some of the top short fiction markets in both the science fiction and mystery fields. In mystery, he won the Edgar Award for the best mystery story of 1986. In the science fiction genre, his stories appeared in Full Spectrum, Strange Plasma, Asimov's Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His most recent book was Dangerous Horizons, a study of famous series characters of the pulp-magazine era. He lived for many years in Huntsville, Alabama, and died in 1993 at the age of sixty-five.

  The story that follows shows that yes, you can have too much of anything—even angels…

  No one agrees why the angels came to Twin Tree. Some claim they were sent and find confirmation in Genesis or Revelation. Others, younger and infected by science, speak of an accidental opening rubbed between alternate worlds. Myself, sometimes I believe the angels were an expedition that went wrong. Sometimes I think that.

  But what do I know? I'm guessing like everyone else. And I have an advantage: I was there at the beginning, watching the angels spill from that shinunery place near the cliff face.

  Not from a hole. It was nothing like that. It was more a dim indentation of air close to the rock. That's a vague description, I grant you. How else could it be? When those angels poured out, all those hundreds of angels rustling like blown canvas, I never thought to look at their doorway.

  Neither did Dad nor Uncle Win. We all stood unbelieving in that muddy road.

  "A million butterflies," Uncle Win yelped.

  "They're little women," Dad cried. He sounded shocked to his bones.

  Both were wrong. The angels weren't either. To tell the truth, I don't know what they were. We called them angels, and they might have been. But at first, I thought they were doves.

  Until one fluttered down not two feet from my eyes. Its wings pulsed air against my face. It peered at me with golden eyes. Its face was the size of my thumbnail, even-featured, with a minute round mouth. Clearly not a bird, or a woman, either.

  This happened in Twin Tree, Alabama, my hometown, an undistinguished little place just south of the Tennessee line.

  If it hadn't been for a week-long rain, I don't suppose Twin Tree would have come closer to angels than Christmas decorations.

  For one solid week, cold gray water sheeted down. The creek shoved into our back fields, tumbling and rough, growling to itself. Trees slumped black and leafless and gloomy. When you went outside between rain spasms, ground water rose around your shoes.

  This was a few years ago. Back then I was fresh out of the Army and inclined to spend my separation money on jeans and beer and seeing if the girls were still cute. Only I felt shaky about going back to college. I'd spent two years in Germany, defending the Free World against the Evil Empire. That was great for the Free World. But I wasn't sure the Army had left anything in my head except brown fuzz.

  The university waited for me a month away, glowing with menace like a red-hot block. That scared me. I decided to hole up at home to get reacquainted with calculus.

  Dad said only a wimp would get free of the military and start reading calculus. Probably he was right. Anyhow, I settled in with the book, the sky curdled, the rain roared down.

  You might think that weather was perfect for studying. But I wasn't alone in the house. Mom and Dad were cooped in with me. Also Aunt Ellen and Uncle Win.

  That's too many people in too few rooms, listening to the rain pouncing at the roof, and the air so wet you stuck to what you

  touched. After a week of it, we could barely stand to look at each other.

  Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, the storm blew out. Dad tossed his cards down on the table and ducked outside. Said he wanted to check things. About an hour later, he came tramping into the barn, where I was shoveling out the horse stalls. I should have been at calculus, but stalls were easier.

  His pants hung black with water. Looking soaked and cheerful, he said: "That rock face down by the creek, it's got a crack in it big as the Mayor's mouth. Think we ought to take some dynamite to it."

  That dig was at Mayor Stevens of Twin Tree. When Dad and his old friend, Sheriff Hock, get together over a weekend, they keep mentioning the Mayor. He is a crooked, rancid liar with the brains of a tick, according to Dad, who doesn't often exaggerate.

  I was tired of books and stalls, so I followed Dad to the outbuilding where he keeps gas and dynamite and such excitable stuff.

  "Those rocks let go," Dad remarked, "they'll cripple up some of those pet horses of yours. It's right by where they water."

  I knew that the cliff face is usually thirty feet uphill from the creek. Any horse wanting to get hit by falling rock would have to hike for the pleasure. Since Dad sounded defensive, I figured he really wanted to hear the bang. That's more entertaining than watching the trees drip.

  While he was fingering through the sawdust in the dynamite box for those yellow-brown sticks, I saw Uncle Win picking his way toward us. He moved through the wet grass as cautiously as a cat meeting company.

  Sticking his head into the doorway, he said in his thin voice: "By God, Sam, you take care now."

  I saw Dad go a little tight around the mouth. Over the past week, he'd heard a lot of advice from Uncle Win.

  I said: "Dad's going to knock down some loose rock, Win. Want to go watch?"

  "Well, I was thinking of doing something else," Win said. "But I guess I better go along. He might make some fool mistake."

  That was not the smartest thing to let out of his mouth. That's why we slopped down to the creek in a haze of bad feelings, the two of them biting off short sentences at each other.

  The fields stopped at a line of thin trees, tangled and black. Beyond them bare rock angled down to a cut roaring with water. Along the upper cliff ran a two-inch crack, deep and ugly, l
ooking ready to drop by itself. I doubted that we needed dynamite. But this was entertainment, not business.

  "Now," Dad said to me, "let's see if the Army learned you anything."

  We fixed a couple of sticks with detonators and fuse. Dad eased them down into the crack, and I packed them good with mud and rock.

  Win cleared his throat and edged toward the road. "Sam, you cut that fuse mighty short."

  "Long enough," Dad growled. "No need to stand in the wet all day."

  He bent to fire the fuse. As it spurted smoke, we stepped off down the road, Win well ahead of us. Dad ambled slowly behind, demonstrating that he knew exactly how long to cut a fuse.

  We stopped in an angle of the road that gave a clear view of the cliff face. After a longish wait, there came a dull little thud, sounding like a sack of cement dropped off the tailgate. Vague gray mist hazed up. A section of rock shrugged loose and slumped leisurely into the creek, slapping up brown foam.

  As the stonefall lolled into the water, a bray of thunder hit us. It was just one peal but violent enough to jar us good.

  Uncle Win yelped like he'd been scalded. Bits of white swirled against the gray rock. A cloud of white spurted up, expanding, whirling, becoming huge, fluttering like confetti in the wind. White billowed and tumbled out over the creek, swelled above the trees. It sprayed all around us.

  Heard Dad's breath suck in his mouth.

  Wings shone all around us. I heard liquid chattering, musical and soft. The air smelled faintly of sunny flower beds.

  "Look out!" yelled Uncle Win, throwing up his hands. "They'll bite!"

  Out of the crazy whirl dropped an angel. It hung before me, balanced on slowly pulsing wings. It was a tiny lustrous thing, perhaps a foot between wing tips. The feathers were lovely soft white, edged by faint blue and transparent yellow. Gliding shades of white flowed like liquid across the inside of the wings.

  Between the wings canted a slender body, long as your hand, the color of rich milk. It had golden eyes. Silver-white fuzz, like dandelion fluff, covered its head. It was completely beautiful.