Angels! Read online

  As I sprawled against the truck, enjoying the feel of warm metal, an angel glided over Blackwort's roof and curved lazily toward me.

  I jerked erect, scowling at it, wondering what would happen if I ducked when it tried to sit on me. But that I never found out. The angel paid no attention to me.

  As it curved by, not ten feet away, I saw that it peered eagerly back toward Blackwort's roof. Its wings glowed bright pink in the sunshine. It was the first angel I'd seen with colored wings.

  As it floated overhead, I got the second shock of the day.

  It was a little woman, all right. No question about it. Firm little breasts rose from the smooth white chest. Her lips shone bright red.

  As she angled smoothly away, another angel streaked past. He was a he, too. No mistake. Blue-tinted wings twitched just a fraction, flicking him above the truck.

  Over the middle of the road, he caught up with pink wing. They linked arms. Silver sound spilled but of the air, like tiny laughing. They curved up past the telephone lines, out of sight.

  When Dad came out, carrying his fan belt, I was still squinting open-mouthed at the sky.

  He said: "That Blackwort's gone slap crazy. Know what he's about? He's in there writing refund checks. Said the angels made him realize how bad he's been overcharging his customers. Wants to make it up to them."

  "Know what I just saw?" I cried, all excited.

  "He's worked back through 1984," Dad said. "Now he's starting on 1983. What's the matter with you?"

  I told him what I'd seen. He laughed till he dropped the fan belt. "Why, they' ve been around people too much," he yelled. "Stands to reason. Little women. Now I heard it all."

  He leaned against the truck, ha-ha-ing till I got disgusted and offered to drive.

  By rights we should have headed home. But I was curious to see more angels holding hands. So I drove toward the center of town.

  It was quiet as the Intensive Care ward. Nobody was on the streets. Half the stores were closed. Nothing moved except a dozen angels whizzing among the trees. One of them, the color of new grass, chased one a light lemon shade. I saw at least a dozen reds and blues, and single gaudy purple fellow.

  "Pull over there by the jail," Dad said. His eyes were swollen from laughing. "I'll just stop in and tell the Sheriff to do something about that undressed lady."

  I trailed him into the jail, which was also the post office, police station, and court. It was a low brick building that had been painted gray before it was painted white. Both colors were flaking off. Inside it smelled like wax and old cigarettes.

  Dad pushed open the door to the Sheriff's office. We stepped into a narrow room packed with desks and filing cabinets heaped with papers. A tall, thin lady, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, tapped at a computer keyboard. At her elbow sat an ashtray mounded with cigarette butts. Beside it sprawled an angel, head propped on one arm, watching her. The angel had blue wings and looked as if he needed a shave.

  "Hey, Dottie," Dad said, looking sideways at the angel. "Where's the Sheriff?"

  "In the jail," she said, not looking up.

  "Good place for him," Dad said. "I want to see him."

  "Can't," she said. "Not visiting hours."

  She spurted smoke down over the angel. Instead of leaping to her shoulder and looking unhappy, he tipped back his head to suck in a long breath. It was a he and could have done with a pair of pants.

  "What's visiting hours got to do with it?" Dad asked.

  "You can't see prisoners except at visiting hours." Her voice would have curdled lemon juice.

  "Sheriff Hock!"

  "Put himself in jail yesterday. Said he was in with bootleggers and should be locked up." She snorted. "I think he's gone crazy. Been listening to too many angels. I'm the only one here and I don't have time to.

  The phone rang. She scooped it up and, in a voice like cut glass, said: "Sheriff's office." A pause. "OK, Mildred. I dunno what we can do. But I'll send somebody around."

  Whacking down the phone, she punched the intercom. "Johnny. You there, Johnny? Damn that fool, he's never there when—Hello, Johnny. Listen, Mildred Panatokis just called. Said there's a bunch of angels acting dirty outside her house. Run over and calm her down, will you?"

  She slapped off the intercom and attacked the computer again. Dad cleared his throat loudly. "About the Sheriff . . .

  "Got the cell right next to the Mayor's," she said irritably. "Give me a break, Sam. I got to get this report out by twelve."

  "What did the Mayor do?"

  "Turned himself in," she snarled. "I had to listen to him confess half the night. If we arrested everybody he named, we'd put wire around the town and call it Twin Tree Concentration Camp."

  The angel rolled over on his stomach and sniggered.

  "What's all that color on his wings?" I asked.

  She transferred her glare from Dad to me. "It's that dry pigment. Mix it with water and you get poster paint. It's a big fad with the angels. Now, please, for God's sake, close the door on your way out."

  As I closed the door, the angel lifted a butt from the ash tray and took a long sniff.

  I stamped to the truck, mad to my bones.

  "What's the matter?" Dad asked.

  "Nothing."

  A purple feather drifted down the windshield and blew across the hood. Overhead, two angels, pink and purple, rolled over and over across the sky, tightly clenched.

  Squinting up at them, Dad remarked: "They sure learned quick."

  "I liked them better when they were white." My own violence surprised me. "They were pretty, white."

  "Things change," he said after a while.

  We drove home silently. Not an angel returned with us. All the way back, I felt waves of anger beating in me. I felt sorry for the angels, embarrassed for them. Every time I thought of the purple and pink angels clinging to each other, I got mad all over again.

  This week, gaudy feathers. Bright lips. Sex characteristics. Next week, they'd be swilling beer and shortchanging friends.

  We hadn't meant to contaminate them. It was completely accidental. That's what burned me. For some reason or the other, they came rushing into this world. Unwary, friendly, impressionable, vulnerable to our casual bad habits. I felt ashamed for the human race.

  If I'd come across Buddy Steeger just them, I'd have smacked his fat face sideways.

  As we drove up to our house, Aunt Ellen came scampering to meet us. She oozed happy malice. "Those angels are hugging each other," she called. "I call that scandalous."

  Scandalous was the word. While we had been gone, there had been an influx of decadence. Pairs of brightly colored angels threshed along the ceiling, piping and exuberant. Little legs kicked. A feather tumbled down.

  "It was just half an hour ago," Aunt Ellen said. "Came flying in here like they'd gone crazy. Now look." She waved fiercely at an intertwined couple at the top of the curtains. "Stop that! Shoo!"

  On the coffee table sat an angel, wings rigidly outstretched. Two others brushed pink powder onto her feathers. A dozen others watched, jingling musically among themselves. Some wore lipstick and sat swelling out their tiny breasts.

  Mom eyed us grimly. "I'm going to have to pass out nightgowns," she said. "I don't hold with all this nakedness."

  "All over Twin Trees the same way," I said, ashamed to look at the angels.

  Cool air puffed in the side door, bringing faint thunder.

  A cluster of white angels huddled on a bookcase watched the proceedings with amazed golden eyes. They looked fascinated and scared. I stalked over to them, said:

  "Do something. They're your friends, aren't they? Settle them down. Don't just sit there."

  "They don't understand the language, Jack," Dad drawled.

  They understood my tone, though. They wouldn't look at me. They pressed close together, gripping hands, all humped up and looking sick. Even their feathers looked miserable.

  Hot flecks of anger swam in me. Turning on my heel,
I said to the angel on the coffee table. "Now stop that. Stop messing yourself up. You look terrible. You look like a prize from the midway."

  Pink wings fluttered, throwing off a faint cloud of powder. The angel tipped back her head, impertinence in every line. She spilled out crystal teasing tones and darted to the top of a window. She began to posture and prance.

  Thunder muttered in the distance. At the sound, the white angels bobbed and twittered. They sounded like hysterical chickens.

  "Conlin' up rain," Dad said, cocking his head. "I do admit, Jack, they don't act like they came from Heaven."

  "They're heavenly creatures," Mom said grimly. "Or they used to be."

  "They should have better sense," he said.

  "We're heavenly creatures," Mom said, "and look at us."

  In the kitchen, a dozen angels pressed against the screen door, peering toward the thunder. I opened the door for them. One by one, they soared out, skimming across the grass, flashing up suddenly to curve smoothly away above the trees.

  The sky was clear but that dull thunder pulsed to my left.

  Dad came to stand beside me. "It thundered when they came," he said.

  Wings flashed and a velvet touch crossed my hand. A white angel hovered near my face. It uttered a single melancholy syllable. As I reached out, the angel pressed its face against my finger. Then it rustled away through the open door.

  That seemed so much like a goodbye that I stepped outside to watch its flight. It was gone. High across the cloudless sky hurried a disorderly stream of angels. Uneven lines of them undulated overhead, white and blue and red, like bits of a shattered rainbow.

  Above the creek, the air churned with angels, thousands of them. They angled in clusters from the sky, flocking over the fields.

  Dad shaded his eyes. "They're coming down at the creek."

  "Let's run down there and watch," I said.

  Uncle Win joined us in the yard. He looked bright-eyed and tickled. "You should of seen that pink angel dance," he said. "Say, when I was in Philadelphia—I guess it was in 1943—I paid three dollars to watch a worse dance than that."

  Another rush of angels pushed from the kitchen. Crying in their sweet voices, they sailed past, wings rattling as they angled into the air. Among them, I glimpsed the pink-winged angel. She spiraled above my head, laughing down, making a teasing face.

  "Best we get moving," Dad said.

  Thunder growled.

  swirling among the trees. They spun like merging galaxies, suns flashing among suns. The air shivered with the beat of wings.

  I felt the hard pulse of my heart; my breath came short.

  Over the creek, the whirling fed into a thick stream of angels that rushed steeply toward the gray rock wall. No thunder now. Only the sound of wings, and a softer sighing sound, like shaken silk. As the angels plunged into the stream, their wings folded; arms and legs extended like divers, they swept straight toward the rock.

  To vanish a few inches from the wall. Even then, I never thought to look hard at their doorway.

  I felt stifled. Images swarmed through my head and twisting bits of words. I thought of angry gods and other worlds, punishment, wings. My brains had melted to soup.

  High above us, at the edge of the stream, sun glowed on pink wings. I saw a little arm wave jauntily toward us. Pink Wing seemed merrily unconcerned. No shadow of retribution marred that airy gesture.

  She plunged smoothly into the stream and was gone.

  I saw with a shock that the stream of angels had thinned. A few stragglers shot past, minnows fleeing for shelter. Thunder growled over the creek. The sound of wings stopped.

  That was all. No angels. No depression in the air. All gone. Leaving behind only the liquid purling of the creek, a sound coarse after the delicate crying of the angels. A sore emptiness opened in me.

  "Well, that's done," Dad said.

  We moved slowly to the lip of the rock wall, peering down at the rocks below and the creek sliding past. A few straggling redbuds grew at the edge. Behind them, a long ugly hole had opened in the soil, as if a groundhog tunnel had collapsed there.

  Uncle Win knelt at the edge and stared over. "What I want to know is where those angels got to? Stands to reason, they must of gone someplace."

  He sniffed sharply. "Stinks here. You can still smell the dynamite."

  Faint breeze rattled limbs. I saw shadows twitch across Win's back and slip across his neck.

  I took a quick step back. Just for a second, I seemed to see movement down in that hole. Movement and a transient glitter like mica bits, bright as tiny eyes.

  The breeze died and the shadows stopped moving and, for the life of me, I couldn't decide whether one had flowed down inside Win's collar or not.

  "Uncle Win," I said. "That sure looks like a snake hole." "Snakes," he yelped, bouncing up away from the hole. "Lord, I purely hate snakes."

  I saw Dad staring hard at the hole. A startled expression was smoothing from his face. "We best get back," he said loudly.

  "Lord, yes," Win said. "I tell you what I want right now. It just come over me that I need a bottle of beer and a good game of stud."

  I whispered to Dad: "Did you see it too? In the hole?" "Didn't see a thing," he told me. "Not a thing."

  He may have been right at that. Still I wasn't sure. It seems reasonable to me that if you can have angels, you can also have whatever things are opposite to angels.

  So after dark, I borrowed some dynamite and eased off down to the creek. I used plenty of fuse. I was sitting at the kitchen table, having a beer and watching the card game, when that distant thud finally came.

  Dad looked up from his cards. His eyes jerked around to mine. But he didn't say anything. No need to explain. He knew that sound. And I saw by his expression that he'd been thinking about the hole near the redbuds.

  There's just no point taking chancés. Not when dynamite is so cheap.

  The Man Who Loved the Faioli

  by

  Roger Zelazny

  Like a number of other writers, Roger Zelazny began publishing in 1962 in the pages of Cele Goldsmith's Amazing. Many writers in this so-called "Class of '62" would eventually achieve prominence, but Zelazny's subsequent career would be one of the most meteoric in the history of SF. By the end of that decade, he had won two Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards and was widely regarded as one of the most important American SF writers of the sixties. Since then, he has won several more awards, and his series of novels about the enchanted land of Amber has made him one of the best-selling SF and fantasy writers of our time. His books include This Immortal, The Dream Master, Lord of Light, Isle of the Dead, and the collection The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories. His most recent novel is Sign of Chaos.

  In the evocative romance that follows, he shows us that you can have your heart's desire—but that sometimes you're allowed to change your mind, too …

  It is the story of John Auden and the Faioli, and no one knows it better than I. Listen—

  It happened on that evening, as he strolled (for there was no reason not to stroll) in his favorite places in the whole world, that he saw the Faioli near the Canyon of the Dead, seated on a rock, her wings of light flickering, flickering, flickering and then gone, until it appeared that a human girl was sitting there, dressed all in white and weeping, with long black tresses coiled about her waist.

  He approached her through the terrible light from the dying, half-dead sun, in which human eyes could not distinguish distances no' grasp perspectives properly (though his could), and he laid his right hand upon her shoulder and spoke a word of greeting and of comfort.

  It was as if he did not exist, however. She continued to weep, streaking with silver her cheeks the color of snow or a bone. Her almond eyes looked forward as though they saw through him, and her long fingernails dug into the flesh of her palms, though no blood was drawn.

  Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli—that they see on
ly the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time.

  The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death—those rare men who still died—and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the -day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it—no, seeks it—with desire and with grace, for such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge.

  John Auden considered his life and his death, the conditions of the world upon which he stood, the nature of his stewardship and his curse and the Faioli—who was the loveliest creature he had seen in all of his four hundred thousand days of existence—and he touched the place beneath his left armpit which activated the necessary mechanism to make him live again.

  The creature stiffened beneath his touch, for suddenly it was flesh, his touch, and flesh, warm and woman-filled, that he was touching, now that the sensations of life had returned to him. He knew that his touch had become the touch of a man once more.

  "I said `hello, and don't cry,"' he said, and her voice was like the breezes he had forgotten through all the trees that he had forgotten, with their moisture and their odors and their colors all brought back to him thus. "From where do you come, man? You were not here a moment ago."

  "From the Canyon of the Dead," he said.

  "Let me touch your face," and he did, and she did.

  "It is strange that I did not feel you approach."

  "This is a strange world," he replied.

  "That is true," she said. "You are the only living thing upon it." And he said, "What is your name?"

  She said, "Call me Sythia," and he did.

  "My name is John," he told her, "John Auden."

  "I have come to be with you, to give you comfort and pleasure," she said, and he knew that the ritual was beginning.

  "Why were you weeping when I found you?" he asked.