“Don’t blame us for what’s in your heart,” Scarlett said. “He’s much, much too old for you.”
*
“We have no need of bodies to exist, but will wear them if we wish to. We gather them from the elements around us and manipulate them as we need. The Kyyth have never restricted ourselves to the human body, but we love it most. Because it is you that we are most alike.
“Through these bodies we seek to bring you wonder. More than hope, or healing, even more than comfort, wonder is our greatest gift, because it’s what makes you most like us. We work to teach you to open your eyes to the magnificent mystery all around you, by showing glimpses of possibilities beyond what is familiar and known to you.
“The greater your sense of wonder, the further into our arms you run, and the more like each other we become…”
*
Austin found them as soon as he opened the door to the shack, because sometime late in the night, or not long after dawn, they’d been set there on the weathered planks, side by side like a pair of shoes waiting to be shined.
He collapsed to both knees when they failed him, and crawled forward to pull free the note left behind, weighted down by those first two things he was meant to find.
What a privilege that you were able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances, the note read. Child-size to full-grown … and now at last in decay.
Her feet. Gabrielle’s feet.
He scrambled off the edge of the porch to fall into dust that caked around his mouth and clogged his nostrils when he screamed.
What a privilege…
Thoughts, they’d only been thoughts — he’d not even spoken them aloud to Gabrielle herself. Who but the Kyyth could steal these things from the deepest wells inside him? Who but the Kyyth could use them so viciously against him? Who but the Kyyth would even think to try?
Who but the Kyyth might invest some deeper purpose in this, perhaps leaving her hobbled but still alive?
Austin began to run along the road as the sun climbed higher and shadows shrank toward their sources, breathing air so still and hot it seemed to lack only fumes of sulfur. The horizon rippled and the world rolled, then he was there on that holy ground named for a dead mule.
He had no time to wonder why Miracle seemed so atypically busy this morning, as though it had shaken off sleep to awaken refreshed and restored. Its residents, old and new, were flinging themselves out the doors of home and shop and diner. They abandoned cars in the street and sometimes even left the engines running. Some laughed like mad fools while others stumbled along with tears streaming from eyes bright with joy. They collided with him. Some kissed him while others even tried to detain him with a hug. He shoved them out of his way and pushed on.
On a quieter block, the doors to the bed-and-breakfast stood wide. Inside he saw meals sitting on the dining room table, half-eaten with no one to finish them. A spindle-back chair lying on its side; a telephone receiver dangling down the wall by its cord.
He called for her but she didn’t answer, and since he didn’t know which room was hers he searched them all until he found her in a tubful of red water. She still wore the shirt and shorts that she’d worn yesterday. Her legs just ended, in blunt tapers, the only sign of the violence that would’ve taken place here. The pale, waxen hand clutching the side of the tub was reposed, no rictus claw, and her head tilted back against the wall, sightless eyes staring toward the door. With confusion. With expectation. With wonder.
He hauled her from the tub, carrying her out into the heat of day, and now he joined that savage and clamorous throng who filled the streets. A straggler, one of the last, with Gabrielle’s head limp on his shoulder and the bled-clean ankles banging against his thigh, and if anyone noticed the condition of her they said nothing, because it was a day of miracles.
Their angel had returned, in the full splendor of their need and expectations.
It was a Memuneh that he’d never seen, stripped now and all but naked except for a white cloth wound modestly about his waist and loins. His skin was as creamy pale as the oil paints of a Botticelli or a Caravaggio, and his thighs chubbier than Austin remembered, plump and pleasing as a cherub’s.
But above the waist he was monstrous, as if he’d attempted to redefine his body to satisfy the demands of both aesthetics and logic. The wingspan he’d grown was huge, some forty feet, and the skeletal additions to anchor it grotesque. A great twin slab of breastbone jutted from the middle of his chest, roped over with muscle mass, and up from his back towered a spine that forced his head forward and stretched the skin of his shoulders into a fin like a dolphin’s.
He held his arms outstretched, wide and inviting, and the wings flapped with such force they could be heard even above the hubbub of the crowd. Whatever song he’d been trying to sing to them was drowned out, and the wings weren’t even white, but a mottled desert brown. Like a hawk’s.
Memuneh hovered where his light had been seen months ago, before the top floor of the hotel, scant yards away from the windows of the room where yesterday morning Austin had tasted a dozen deaths. And where was Scarlett? The entire town, it seemed, was crowded around the hotel’s foundation, screaming and crying and reaching for this messenger of the divine, while trampling those who fell beneath their eager feet.
But was it even happening? The furious unreality — this was only the latest in a lifetime of moments when Austin had wondered if it all hadn’t been some elaborate projection arcing through his mind as he fell from the train toward its wheels, sure to clip him off at the ankle, if not higher.
Or maybe he was still in the tunnel after falling clear but striking his head, waiting to awaken to the rough hands and reeking breath of the men nobody wanted, driven out and sent to live along the tracks.
Over the heads of the crowd their gazes met, and when the Kyyth’s eyes settled on the bundle in Austin’s arms, Memuneh began to cry. Tears spilled down his cheeks and fell on the crowd like raindrops, and they wailed with delight and waved their hands for more, opening mouths and wagging tongues as if for Eucharists or snowflakes.
The tilt of his wings changed and Memuneh began to drift groundward. Austin hadn’t wanted to believe it and now, with those copious tears, he knew that this murder could not have been Memuneh’s work. Memuneh may have been a liar but his heart was too soft to slay anything.
Yet would he have enough heart to undo the butchery of another? Mend the damage, reinfuse the drained blood? Cheat death?
Memuneh’s bare soles touched down on the asphalt thirty feet away, but before he could take two steps they swarmed him. He was engulfed in a clutching tide of hands and devotion, and soon all that was visible were his wings, beating at the heads of the crowd. Feathers were ripped out in tufts, quills and all, then even these vast limbs disappeared, churned into the frenzied rapture. Moments later, above the mob rose a triumphant fist, clutching a heart.
Austin turned to carry her away from the sight and was in the next block, almost as far as the road home before he dared to turn and look back.
Someone had taken the severed wings to the hotel roof and now stood at its edge. Austin recognized him — a teenage boy with a mongoloid face and a child’s mind, brought here months ago for a healing that had never been bestowed. He now held the skewed twists of membrane and tatter and hollow bone, teetering against blue sky, then he leapt, plummeting toward a crowd that scattered in panic and left him to strike the street alone.
Austin didn’t wait to see what they did with him next.