“Let’s go.” He took the angel, wrapped in his raincoat, to his car. He saw Mrs. Levin peeking out her window, as usual. If he ran into her in the laundromat, she’d ask him who the girl was. Where she’d come from, as she had with all the others. The woman was nosier than his mother. Only more dangerous.
The highway was busy with Monday traffic and the road out to the quarry full of double trailer trucks hauling granite.
“We’ll have to drive through the quarry works. You have to hunker down then, or I’ll have to explain about you.”
The angel seemed to shrink until she was a lumpy pile of raincoat on the floor of the car. Frank turned up his tape of Buchanan’s “When a Guitar Plays the Blues,” as the sound of gravel under his wheels began to make him nervous.
No one paid him any mind until he reached the far end of the quarry works and the dirt path began. A truck blocked his way and he had to get out and ask that it be moved.
A man in a business suit stood nearby, talking with a worker.
“Hey, you the driver?” Frank asked the worker.
The suit turned. “Can I help you?”
“I need that truck moved.”
“You can’t go down that path, man. It’s quarry property. A dirt road. We don’t want to be liable for what could happen if…”
“I was here yesterday.” He thought fast. “Hang gliding. I left some of my gear there. Too heavy to walk it all out with me. I’ll be in and out. Promise.” He smiled reassuringly.
The suit checked his watch. He frowned, looked up to the sky, then down at his watch again.
“In and out. You have ten minutes.”
“Thanks. That’s all I need.”
The suit instructed the worker to move the truck and Frank was off.
“Boy, that was close. We almost got stopped.” She oozed back up onto the seat, her hair covering her face.
For the first time all day, he sensed her apprehension, anxiety. He felt her growing distress.
“Don’t you worry. We’ll get there. I lied to the guy, but I don’t think they’ll come in and get us. He’s probably too busy worrying about some granite problem.”
She looked at him plaintively. He patted her knee. Her wings fluttered a tiny bit under the raincoat.
He stopped the car at the end of the road at the felled trees. Another car, a huge sedan, was parked just off the road. Maybe that was her. The stiff, professor-looking woman, he thought.
“Let me scout ahead. I don’t want anybody to hurt you.”
She sent him her feelings of trepidation, then acquiesced. He sauntered down the mountainside, slipping in his Sunday shoes. He could see someone in the small clearing where he’d found his angel. A tall woman, dressed soberly, her pale hair tied into a severe bun. She began to turn toward him, so he hid behind a tree.
Just then, he felt a subtle vibration, a quaking of the air. His skin itched ever so slightly. While he was still staring at the woman, she looked up. Frank’s eyes followed hers.
The gray sky became strangely pixilated, as if all its atoms had expanded to an inch in diameter and were randomly dancing and jittering over him. The clouds thickened like marshmallow puffs, then grew skittery, too. The vibration in the air became more palpable. Frank looked back down.
His angel was standing beside the woman. They weren’t speaking with their mouths, but it was clear they were deep in conversation. The woman began disrobing. Frank felt himself go ramrod hard watching. When the woman was naked, he saw she was built just like his angel, and that she had deep long scars where her wings had been removed. The two of them embraced, their hands slowly tracing over the other’s body. Frank shuddered, ejaculating in his Sunday slacks.
After regaining his composure, Frank got angry. He’d made it clear to his angel that she was going back with him, but since witnessing this relationship, his doubts grew.
He’d just be patient. Yes, that was it. Once the meeting was over, he’d go in, introduce himself, and they’d leave. He might even have to be a bit forceful. Females required a firm hand, he thought.
The itching worsened, reminding Frank of how his nose felt when he brushed his teeth. The sky grew darker, gradually, until it was as dark above the trees as it was below. When he looked at his angel and the woman, they were staring at him. His angel gestured for Frank to come closer. She reached out to him, but it was as though his head was stuffed with cotton. What she wanted wasn’t clear.
Sluggishly, Frank walked toward them. His angel’s wings were beating a waltz rhythm in the air behind her. She was absolutely beaming with happiness, her body aglow like neon in the night.
He could almost hear his angel as he stood at the edge of the clearing. He thought he heard her call to him, “Come stand here.” He stepped closer, into the ferns.
He yelled to the other woman, “She’s my angel! I’m taking her back with me when you’re done.”
The woman shook her head, pointing to her back. Then she put her hands together, touched them to her lips, then to his angel’s, as if to pray.
Frank understood. God. God was coming to take this woman up to heaven to return her wings. It was as his mother had said, after all. The woman was an angel—a fallen angel. And his angel was her guide back. It would be up to him to wait for his angel to return. God would smile favorably on that. On his patience. Not one of Frank’s virtues before. But a virtue God wanted for all His children.
The faint sound of a choir filled Frank’s ears. The two angels seemed to hear it too, and gazed up. His angel reached out and took the other in her arms as a beam of white light thrust through the darkness like a fist. The light engulfed them. A corona of orange light cascaded down around the white.
Frank looked up, his hands together, his eyes full of tears, his heart full of reverence. The light was so intense he couldn’t see God. Still, he spoke to Him.
“Lord, I’ve been reborn. I never believed in you before. Not really. It was just to please my mother, and because my father told me to always listen to her. But, you’ve sent me proof. I’ve been saved. All the bad stuff I’ve done? Never again.
“I know maybe I should tell the truth, and go to jail. Do my penance. But, wouldn’t it be better if I just go forward and do your good work now? I hope so.
“Me and my angel. For you. Anything.”
Frank glanced over to the fallen angel, now wrapped in his angel’s arms in the center of the white light. His angel’s wings built speed until she lifted them both off the ground. The orange light seemed to pulsate around them. His angel scanned him, her black eyes glinting in the light. He heard her say loudly and clearly, in his mind, “Good-bye.”
“NO!” He screamed, racing toward the light. “I want to be with you! With God!”
He fell to the ground on his knees, arms outstretched, weeping.
“Please, God, please.”
His angel disappeared up into the light. Frank felt a deep sorrow. He didn’t know if it was his sorrow or hers, or both.
The very next feeling he had was of warmth. Radiant, soul-soothing warmth. It’s God’s hand, he thought. God, I’m ready.
The orange light swallowed the white, then intensified, focusing on Frank. He knew then that God had chosen to call him. Knew it in his very bones. Knew it, even as the light turned every molecule in his body to dust.
Often I don’t know the origin and inspiration for a story until after it is done and sent off to an editor. “His Angel,” on the surface, is a tale of a madman who seeks a twisted redemption in the saving of an angel, and finds his just reward. The more I thought about the story, I realized it’s about the power of faith, hope, and a belief in God, about the sexual component and profoundly sick compulsion in the serial killer’s act, and lastly about the question of whether we are visited and studied by aliens or guarded by aņgels. Each of these things on its own fascinates me, and as happens during the magical process of creation, an interesting mix that became “His Angel,” was born.