Radon [Working Title]
Chapter Directory
1. Her Skirt Was Pleated Once but Now All the Folds Look the Same
It's quiet up here. From the roof, the sky appears to swallow up the land. The ghostly forms of other apartment complexes and office towers are littered across the sickly green-tinged horizon like a pox.
Of course, in the hollow of the long-dry rooftop pool, the view is not quite so impressive. Five foot stained concrete walls rise in all directions. A glowing neon mass of indescribable colour sits just off centre on the algae-caked floor. Beside it, a young woman sits with her legs crossed, craning over the mass, pinching and pulling at it with her fingers.
Delta squints at the pile of magic before her. Sweat on her brow reflects the otherworldly glow, as if coated in multicoloured glitter. A creased skirt blooms at her waist, not quite long enough to cover a tattered pair of shorts. A stretched sports bra is practically draped across her torso. When you have hundreds of empty apartments to yourself, it doesn't really matter how you dress.
Suddenly, Delta's fingers close over the something within the mass, and she pulls. Soon the pile begins to come apart, untangling into a long, continuous thread which she folds into her lap.
Once all the magic is spooled together with at least some semblance of neatness, she begins to weave a spell.
The sky has grown dark. About as dark as it ever gets in the city of Radon, at least. Delta stands over a luminous web of energy. It casts the surroundings in an eerie, ever-shifting light.
She bends down and takes hold of a loose end, dragging it outward to the wall. With practised deftness she secures it to a gleaming hook in the cement. Instantly a cerulean hue spreads over the web from the hook. Finally. This is the easy part.
Delta circles the web, tying it off to three more hooks around the wall. She reaches for the last thread.
And then a piercing psychic scream cuts through her mind.
2. Rending Heaven
Rath finds himself between Heaven and Earth for the last time. Fear rushes through his slight body like a strong wind through a tight gap between buildings.
And he just can't stop feeling. He has never felt pain before, or much of anything, really.
He can't forget the cold blade in his skin. The ripping, the slicing, the needling that brought on a torrential pain like a deadly shock. The sudden lightness of his body as the tubes were torn away and the machinery cut out.
It was wrong, it was all a mistake.
But now, as he tumbles to the ground, wingless, he can't think about any of that. There is only pain and approaching death. Rath screams internally as shadowy high-rises rush upwards, past him.
And suddenly he makes contact. At first it feels like the blades are back, they're slicing into his back and his arms and his legs and he panics. Then something gives way, and his body drops a couple feet to the ground.
Through watery eyes he sees glowing threads wrap around his torso, his legs. They sink into his skin, warm and comforting, like the arms of a father. Rath is not dead.
Yet he begins to feel himself falling away. He doesn't see the sky but the blinding lights of the operating theatre.
And then Rath sinks from consciousness for the first time in his life.
3. He Sure as Hell Isn't Swimming
Delta watches in horror as a screaming, bloodied corpse falls from the sky into the outstretched arms of her protection spell. But not for long. The shriek of pure anguish from inside the being's soul sends a knife-edged panic slicing through her, and she scrambles backwards into a wall.
She's already halfway up the rotting rungs of the nearest pool ladder as threads of magic curl up and sink into the body. That was one spool wasted. But there's no retrieving it now. Besides, surely she has more back in her room.
In an instant the screaming trails off into nothing, a comet fading into oblivion. Shocked by the sudden silence, she steals a glimpse back over her shoulder briefly at the figure in the hollow below. The blue light from the weaving, fading rapidly, illuminates drapes of silken hair, slender limbs. Wounds are dark voids cut into sickly pale skin, spilling onto the concrete.
Delta turns away, nauseated, unconsciously grabbing handfuls of her skirt in tight, straining fists. Suddenly her head feels too heavy for her neck. A neck that feels too delicate, too exposed. Her ankles, her wrists, her neck. They're so fragile and there's blood. There's so much blood.
Delta groans, and makes her way to the stairwell door on tiptoes.
She reaches both hands into a hole where the door handle used to be and pulls it open, deaf to its agonized screech, then descends into the darkness. With practised hability she skips every couple steps on her way down, the metallic ring of each step sounding out like a fluttering heartbeat. One floor down. Two floors down. Three floors down.
A beat-up heavy wooden door with a crude number five scratched into the layered paint. Closer examination would reveal it was once blue, then brown, and now a grimy red. Delta throws it open with almost violent determination.
The obnoxiously sulfuric tint of the wall lamps of the fifth floor hall greets her with an almost friendly flicker. After rushing past countless open or battered down doors into darkness to her left and right, Delta arrives at her apartment, grasping at her shorts pocket. She retrieves two keys, quickly selecting one. A worn metallic charm shaped like a classic witch's hat jingles as she unlocks the door.
Or opens the first lock, at least. Delta then inserts the second key into another, shinier lock set above the first. Only then does she enter her apartment, slamming the door at her back. It produces two simultaneous clicks.
She sighs, a long, deep, deflating exhale of only a fraction of the fear caught up in her chest.
4. Don't Bleed On the Carpet
The door doesn't open when Rath knocks. The sound shoots up and down the hall between the hollows of doorframes into the unknown, then quickly dies.
The entire hallway is choked with the odor of magic-making. Sweet beeswax, herbs, and something sour. Sweat? Mold? The stench clots around the door. And then he's back at the bottom of a pool staring into the sky with tendrils of light reaching across his field of vision.
Rath blinks the memory away and stares down at the carpet. The dim light tints the well-trodden, grimy fibers a somehow comforting shade of yellow. Or maybe it was mold.
He tugs at an ill-fitting camisole he found on a rather sparse clothesline back up on the roof. The lace-trimmed hem fails to cover his stomach, exposing deep slashes into milky flesh. Coupled with a meagre pair of shorts, he felt had put together what seemed to be the most angelic outfit available, at least next to the sweatskirt and threadworn underwear. It feels a little better to be covered. He can almost forget what he's still missing.
Even so, the pain of the loss is unforgettable.
Shuffling on the other side of the door.
"Hrghhh—hhlo?" Rath barely chokes out a greeting, feeling liquid trickling down the back of his throat. He coughs, the motion splitting open the holes in his stomach again. He imagines his organs slipping to the floor.
Silence hangs heavy in thick air.
"Please, I'm an angel." Even as his legs finally give way, and he finds himself falling into oblivion once more, Rath thinks about God.
The door opens when Delta pulls. Swings inward, fast. And in an instant with an unsettling crunch a mass of poppy-red hair spills over the threshold, dragging with it a torso more limp than the clothes it wears.
Delta lets go something like a squeak. She recovers quickly, tightening her grip on a roll of loosely woven bandage, even as she decides she would rather have every vital organ cut out of her body than face the living corpse in front of her. She thinks it's alive. More accurately, perhaps, it thought it was alive before its mind fell silent.
If there's one thing Delta's grateful for, it's that she is not cursed with witnessing the tortured dreams of the unconscious. Still, she has long wondered if it might be preferable to knowing thoughts and feelings of those still conscious.
The corpse's foreign thoughts and feelings seem to swirl around in her stomach, kicking up a dust storm. A fallen angel. Lying broken at her feet. Delta isn't the type of psychic to receive visions of the future, yet a dizzying intoxication rakes through her, an electric shudder whispering promises of change to every nerve in her body.
It's over, she thinks to herself. This thin little strip of angel roadkill will set me free.
5. Linoleum Garden
Just for a moment Rath wonders if he has returned to Heaven, and dread fills up his lungs like foul water.
He finds himself in a cold ceramic womb, pressed against walls that go up and up and up into infinite blankness. But unlike Heaven, this place is devoid of light. If he squints, up in the eternal empty there looks to be something like negative stars, black spots on a sea of grey.
Yet the brutal void smells sweet. Weeks and months worth of candle drippings line the edges of the bathtub. A small netted bag containing a bar of soap hangs from a showerhead, looming in the darkness like a skeletal beast. Realizing where he truly is only brings a chill reaching frozen, paralyzing claws across his back.
He was in a pool, in a stairwell, in a hallway, at a door, and then...here. Someone had put him here.
He pushes aside the shower curtain just enough to peek into the beyond. Scarred floral linoleum tile in all the colors of a dead garden extends across the bathroom. Individual hairs are scattered across the floor, blue with brown at the ends. Some of the blue has leached onto the tiles. But no one seems to be out there.
As he hauls himself out of the bathtub he begins to think he might fall to the floor too, leaving whatever blood might be left in his body to leach out over the dead linoleum flowers. His head spins and he braces himself against the sink, breath ragged.
When he straightens he is confronted with something gazing back at him in, and in the darkness it looks like a wisp of a sliver of a shadow. Wide, wet eyes gleam. They hold a yearning and a hunger that he already knows.
Looking away from the mirror tears at the fibre of his being.
Enchanted by the morbid desire to know, Rath turns to search for a light switch. But he finds another figure instead, gripping the door frame with pale knuckles as though it was trying to melt away into the wood.
"oh my god," it says, "oh my god oh my god oh my god."
Rath tries to laugh, because if he was not at this moment trapped on earth with half of his body missing this might be an appropriate time to laugh to put the poor thing at ease. It sounds a lot like another hacking-spitting-blood-cough. "...hm. Funny you should say that. I suppose that makes two of us in need of heavenly intervention."
The person at the door shakes, shoulders convulsing as if they're about to cry.
"oh. um. 'Be not afraid' as the High Angels say." He takes a step forward, extending a bloodstained hand in what he hopes looks like a friendly gesture, but the figure takes two back into the depths of the apartment. "This is all a horrible mistake, I need to get back up there...if you help me, I can help you."
The figure has taken yet another step back, suddenly illuminated from below by the eerie light of a jar of glowing thread set on a large cardboard box. After a pause it nods, silent. Somewhere concealed within the shadow-distorted face, Rath detects the hint of a smile.
*
Delta feels like a caged animal, but puts on what she hopes is a convincing smile. The angel still has one hand stretched towards her and for a moment she can't do anything but stare at it. Brown black blood has settled into every crease of his skin, under every fingernail.
"I can-- um..." Every demand and question he wants to ask of her has already flooded her mind. But it's better to play pretend. "How 'bout we grab a seat in the next room and figure this out?" she attempts. "This is a-- a lot to process."
"Oh, of course." Something cold and heavy hangs between them, something beyond the dark and damp of the apartment. Like the space between the wrong sides of two magnets. She knows he feels it too. "You may call me Rath, by the way."
"Cool," she says, offhand, already ushering him into a cramped living room. Something about the way he talks is rather jarring. Rath looks back at her, an expectant glimmer emerging from deep in shadowed eye sockets. She pauses, flashes an apologetic smile. "Delta."
He grins, perhaps a little too wide. "Very cool," he echoes, shaping the words carefully as if tasting them for the first time. And then it echoes again, between the walls of his sad little fall-addled skull. Maybe what she finds most unsettling is the way he seems to believe wholeheartedly in what he says. Even worse, he believes in what she says.
Acid rises in her throat. He feels safe in here, even after she locked him, unconscious and bloodied, into her bathroom for the night. He doesn't question, he doesn't fear, he doesn't think. Just looking at him feels like fingers pressing into a bruise on her brain. Delta watches, paralyzed by rising anger, as he delicately lowers himself into the middle spot on her plush blanket-covered couch. She wonders how she could make him afraid.
Rath looks around the room, deaf to the thundering of her mind. "You are even more of a proficient spellcrafter than I first thought," he says, that same skullish smile splitting his face in two. He gazes entranced into a jar of magic thread he picked up off the top of a small pile on the coffee table.
Similar jars are stacked up on and under shelves, tables, stray dining chairs. Sagging and shredded cardboard boxes litter the floor, supporting and containing more jars. A couple dead potted plants are perched about the place. The blinds have remained closed for a while now, but broken slats let in just enough light to see by during the day. Mostly. But now, the sky is deeper than black, and only the pinkish glow of magic lights the living room. Rath taps the jar, the glass ringing out like a bell.
"My god, put that down," Delta scoffs, "or do you wanna get cursed?"
Rath jumps and scrambles to place the jar back in it's place. It slips from his hand and hits the nearly bald carpet at his feet with a light thunk. It doesn't break, but he's already shrieking.
She snatches it up and waves it in his face. "Get a grip, aren't fallen angels supposed to be-"
"DELTA, THE CURSE!" he cries, ripping it away and cradling it to his chest.
Delta groans. "I was bullshitting, come on."
He stares at her wordlessly like some kind of small wet animal, still clutching the jar. Maybe disposing of her own curse wasn't worth dealing with him. But it had to be.
Rath breaks his silence with another forced, choking laugh. "You really are a delight, aren't you?" he attempts, quite sincerely, laying on all the angelic diplomacy he can muster. "You know, I seem to be learning a lot about you just by being here, and yet you know very little of me..."
Delta winces. "Wow, that's crazy huh. Do tell," she says dryly. "Just gimme back that jar, I feel a long sob story coming on and you keep getting your blood on my couch."
"Are you going to do something malicious with it?" He tilts his head, skeptical.
"The blood or the jar?"
A pause.
"Please do not consume the couch-blood. Though I have been disconnected from my angelic bindings, the substances leftover in my circulatory system would likely kill you within the hour," Rath explains matter-of-factly, all the while regarding her with a profound horror.
"Fascinating, God I feel like we're closer already."