Angel of the Abattoir
One o’clock and the streets of Soho are even busier than they were twelve hours, earlier in full sunlight. Night people of all stripes teem through the crumbling brick buildings: drunks from every walk of life, the lustily dressed pretty faces and the men whom they entice into the bars like sirens, to wreck their bank accounts against whisky on the rocks.
Vicki Geogeghan flits through them like a fish, aware but not seeing, seen but not observed. Her heels clacked against the cobbles and the hem of her trousers was chill against her ankles. It had drizzled all day and five hours waiting tables had not been enough time for the weather to make up its mind. The half-hearted rain slicked the streets like a fever-sweat, pallid and cold, gurgling through the gutters. Fabric dewed its caress: the wool suits darken to thunderhead grey, the PVC skirts kaleidoscope like peacock feathers with thousands of flies’ eyes and Vicki’s own trousers repel the water only so well that it drips from her ankles on to the bare skin above her shoes.
All in all, it had been a miserable night. Her summer was sliding away from her; it would be months before her next loan cheque came, most of her friends had gone home and she didn’t have time to see the remainder because she spent all her available time waiting table to pay the rent on the rat-hole she was sharing with Sandy and Tess. Still, it beat living at home.
Something moved in the corner of her eye. One of Dr. Frankenstein’s abortions was hurling grown men into the gutter from a neon lit basement doorway. A petite oriental woman was screaming abuse at the half dozen men. They did their best to keep up; considering they had already seen what a human lump hammer wearing a suit could do to them. Without meaning to, Vicki looked at the scene as she passed. One of the men, rolling drunk and leering like Mr Punch, caught her eye. She was unable to suppress a shudder. Huddling deeper into her jacket, the fleece collar set with beads of rain, her grandmother’s crucifix cold against her skin, she sped up, trying to put the whole scene behind her.
She’d walked several hundred yards and was almost to Piccadilly Circus when she felt the eyes burrowing into the back of her head. Walking as fast as she could after being on her feet so long, Vicki turned off the main thoroughfare and ducked in to an alley way to wait for whatever was following her to pass.
They had been right behind her, all the way.
Five, maybe six men, the same that had been thrown out of the strip club had followed her. They crowded the entry, the one that had caught her stare advanced ahead of the rest. Sweat, sick and spilled beer filled the air. Her heart chilled. She closed her eyes and for the first time in years prayed. She slid down the wall, curling as small as she could get. The man in front of her started to gasp and splutter. Something warm and wet splashed across her forehead.
Then silence.
A strong floral odour poured over her, just masking a smell of butcher shop and open sewer. Peace. For the first time in years, she felt peace. Wiping whatever had dripped over her face away, Vicki opened her eyes. The alley was empty. Well, almost empty. What was left of her would be attackers lay strewn about like discarded offal. Blood had reached a first storey window. And a shadow was cast where no shadow should be.
It was fearful, terrible to behold, standing like a man but built like a fusion of bird and insect, bending where no limbs should be jointed. Delicate hands arched from its back, sheathed with scales of dark metal. Wings, the shadow had wings. And eyes of fire.
The creature’s eyes burned like stars. They were the only feature on its face. No mouth, no nose. Only the eyes which pierced her soul with a lovers touch. A rapture of images crowded into her mind and she knew no fear. Lambs blood daubed on doors. Nuclear fire raining down on screaming cities, the doubtful transformed to salt. Hate: as old as time, older still, unsullied by the aeons, honed to an astounding edge. Yet, it meant her no harm.
Without warning it launched into the sky, no muscles tensed, to limbs moved, it simply shot upward, the razor-edged wings stretching the width of creation, which rolled backward in her skull and turned to deepest night.
When she came to, Vicki was on a bed with a mattress so thin it may as well not been there. The room was small, sparsely decorated except for an icon of the sacred heart and a tortured god hanging from the cross, and half a dozen different polishes scented the air. Vicki was trying to count them when the door opened.
A young woman in a nun’s habit came in holding a mug of tea. Somehow Vicki knew everything was going to be alright…
Recent New Age thinking has spawned a slew of pastel 'Your Guardian Angel Majick' books. This about much more Old School angels, the kind that turn people to salt...
