I believe that the mysterious—the not-to-be-explained—is a key to our inner lives; to that part of our inner selves that has no sense of time past or time present or time future. We can contemplate and we can try to write about it, but we can never comprehend it. Always elusive, and tantalizing, it recedes before us like a desert mirage, and perhaps this very elusiveness is the subject about which we write, given finite dimensions.
Out of an actual dream-catcher, and a night, or nights, of dream fragments, the story “The Dream-Catcher” gradually emerged. I did not write the story for some time after the dreams, needing time to imagine a coherent structure for them, and an ostensible “theme.” The story bears a glancing resemblance, at least in my eyes, to a story of mine called, “The Doll,” written almost twenty years ago… a discovery I made some time after I’d written it.
What this might mean, I don’t know. And I assume I’m better off not knowing.
His Angel
ROBERTA LANNES
Since 1985, when she sold her first horror story to Dennis Etchison for his seminal anthology Cutting Edge, Roberta Lannes has contributed short stories for anthologies in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, some translated into Russian, Japanese, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Italian. She has also published numerous articles, interviews with fellow authors, and essays in the science fiction genre. Her collection The Mirror of the Night was published in 1997.
Lannes currently lives in Southern California. After thirty-eight years of teaching high school art and English, she retired and is now working on a young adult dark fantasy trilogy, a Japanese vampire novel, numerous short stories, and a story collection. Her digital artwork and photography has appeared in magazines, in website designs, on CD covers, iPhone app screens, and book covers. Visit her author website at www.robertalannes.com.
FRANK GARLAND KNELT BY a mound of soil, scooped a handful, and held it beneath his nose. He loved the smell of fresh, moist earth. It recalled a youth of camping trips with his father, playing in the mud with his older brother, and burying secret things. He chuckled. He hadn’t grown up much in thirty years. Here he was, still burying things that he didn’t want found. Before it was broken toys, uneaten food, and pieces of his mother’s jewelry. Now it was broken women.
Standing, he let the dirt fall into the depression, nearly full. He shoveled in the remaining loam and patted it down. There.
As he reached up to pluck a leafy bough for scrabbling the earth, he was distracted by a glint in the pearly gray sky. He broke off the limb and stepped into a small clearing.
Across the ravine, over the next ridge, a hang glider was falling. He knew the thermals off the granite quarry below often popped a glider up too fast for even the best aviator to recover. Light bounced off the white wings as they crumpled like origami. The pilot tumbled and the wings came open a moment. Frank saw that it wasn’t a guy wrapped in a polyester cocoon, but a woman dressed in flowing white. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes with his jacket sleeve. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered, “it’s an angel.”
She fell into the forest, swallowed by a thicket of trees. Frank closed his eyes, in his mind marking the spot where she landed as just beyond the boundary of the quarry works. The road up the mountainside from where he stood would take him to the bridge a few miles down, then across to the gravel strip leading into the quarry works. He knew the patch of land where she touched down. He’d get there before anyone else. This angel was going to be his.
A cassette tape of Roy Buchanan, his guitar screaming “Country Boogie,” filled the car. Frank drove in haste, warily watching the Sunday roads for errant traffic. He reached the gravel road quickly, sped up, his compact car shifting over the stones like a skier on icy snow. Past the quarry to a dirt road, into the forest, he turned his headlights on. The canopy of fir and evergreen blotted out the sun. His beams found a twisting path which slowed him down.
When he found the way blocked by fallen trees, he pulled over, his heart working like a jackhammer. He got out of the car to stand in the lush, still shade. His mind’s eye was on the area where the angel had landed, and he would let that image guide him as he wended his way through the dense growth of the forest floor. He was feeling what his father had called the “feral hunting mechanism.” Allowing himself to be led by pure sensation. A sensation of hunger, not for food but for something else: prey, love, release. It drove him forward, blinding him with an appetite he didn’t understand.
After a while, Frank began to spin in the shadowy light. Sweat poured through his scalp, down his neck, into his shirt. She was there, not far, but his sense of direction had begun to elude him. The ground had flattened out. He was no longer near the ridge-line. He was lost. Frustration grew until he howled out loud. The sound came from a cavern of sheer anger, rising up with the power of a child’s fear.
The sounds of animals scurrying away yanked him from his rage. He told himself to breathe. Relax. Turning to his left, he headed toward a shaft of light a couple of hundred feet away. The ground began to slope and he knew he had found his direction again. As he neared the light, he felt the frustration pass into irritation then disappear as elation filled him.
“There you are,” he whispered. He found her, resplendent on the mossy loam amidst ferns at the edge of an opening in the trees.
Frank slowed until he was just out of view, behind a tree. The shaft of light seemed focused on her. For a moment, Frank could swear he heard a choir of angels in the far distance. He stood there, watching, searching for signs she was alive. God was watching, too, he thought. Cautiously, he moved near.
Her wings were wrapped about her like a gossamer chrysalis. Up close, he saw that her wings weren’t made of feathers, but long thin flaps of pearlescent white skin. The angel’s face was turned toward the earth, her pale golden hair splayed against the ferns. Bare feet curled out from the bottom of her wings; the toes long, tapering to pink points.
He wiped his dirty hands on his jeans and reached out to touch her. As his fingertips alighted upon her wing, she quaked. Frank recoiled, then suddenly, without a warning of sorrow, fell to his knees weeping.
“Oh… my angel. God, please, don’t let her die.” A deep, barbed pain ripped forth from him, wrenching his body with spasms of anguish. He blubbered over her, a ten-year-old boy once again, mourning his father. Seeing him at the bottom of the cliff, his body twisted in ways for which it was not built. An accident. An act of God. He hadn’t cried since. Or perhaps it was at his brother’s funeral. He felt as weak and flimsy as a new leaf. His father would have told him to get a hold of himself. He had an angel to save.
All business, Frank began untangling the angel’s hair from the foliage. He put his hand under her neck and turned her face up. Her skin was so pale, he thought she was dead. He put his dirty hand against her cheek, full of hope. She felt warm!
“Come on, angel, I’m just going to lift you up and carry you to my car. I won’t hurt you.” He worked his hands under her and swept her into his arms. Incredibly, she was almost weightless. When he’d carried Sharon down from his car just a couple of hours ago, she’d felt like a two-hundred-pound sack of flour. The angel was as light as a loaf of bread.
With her life in his hands, Frank moved stealthily toward his car. The angel made cooing noises, occasionally forming her lips around a word. He thought she whispered “Lord” a few times, though he could swear everything he heard was like a thought in his own head.