I knew, of course—every schoolchild knows—that an angel can only be left in an abandoned building for so long before they will inevitably return to the ranks of the Nameless; some angels can maintain their integrity for centuries, but those are the angels of great castles and churches, not the angels of seedy rooming houses. A very few angels choose to Fall and a very few angels choose dissolution—to be destroyed without hope of any kind of resurrection.
“The Angel of the Pear Tree provided no useful evidence,” Crow said briskly, and I deduced that we were not going to mention that he felt about the word “Consensus” the way I felt about the word “beast,” nor that he had clearly known the Angel of the Pear Tree personally. “If anyone knew the truth, they never confessed it. John Williams’s corpse was paraded through the streets in a barbaric spectacle. They buried him”—he jerked his head toward the door—“out there. The body was accidentally dug up again during some road repairs. And,” raising his voice, “the skull somehow ended up here.”
The landlord smirked and said nothing.
“So,” Crow said, picking up the skull and turning it pensively in his hands, “this is the skull of a murderer and/or a murder victim and/or a suicide. He might have been a completely innocent man.”
“Makes a better story if he wasn’t,” said the landlord.
“That depends on what kind of stories you like,” said Crow.
“What happened to the rest of the skeleton?” I said.
The landlord shrugged. “Potter’s field, probably.”
“Or the nearest storm drain,” Crow said.
“You’re a braver man than I am,” I said to the landlord. “What if John Williams wants his skull back?”
The landlord shrugged, with another of his grins, as Crow handed him the skull. “Hasn’t happened yet.”
PART TWO
THE DISSOLUTION FEATHER
5
An Appeal for Help
Just before midnight on the eighth of August, my new problem reasserted itself.
This time, instead of merely waking in the morning with a head full of nightmares and a body full of cramps, I woke to cloudy consciousness in the middle of the night. It is hard to describe, for I was not human and my thoughts were not a human being’s thoughts, but I was still myself. I still knew that I would be human in the morning.
And I knew I had to be quiet. I didn’t understand my human fear of discovery, so that I had a confused belief that there were predators in the sitting room. In the morning, I would recognize the predators as Fallen, but in the night, all I knew were shadows and red eyes that glowed like hot coals and a sharp musty smell that meant only terror. I wanted to be outside, running, hunting, using the great muscles of my jaws to bite and rend and break. The door I had carefully locked was irrelevant; in the morning, I would understand that I could simply have pushed through it like a lion at the circus through a paper hoop. But there were predators in the sitting room, predators thronging the stairs.
I whined, but softly, and pulled the blankets off the bed to make a nest in the closet.
And that was where I woke in the morning, aching and unbelievably cramped and almost sick with gratitude for the locked door that had meant so little in the night. It took me twice as long as usual to complete my morning routine, and when I finally hobbled out to the sitting room and the breakfast table, Crow said, “You look horrible. Are you ill?”
“No,” I said, pouring a cup of tea—blessed, miraculous tea that helped the whole thing seem like a nightmare instead of bitter reality. “I spent a bad night. And it isn’t, by the way, considered polite to tell someone how bad they look.”
“I don’t know very much about diseases,” Crow said, and I had lived with him long enough by then to recognize it as an explanation, if not exactly an apology.
It had never occurred to me before beginning this living arrangement what a skewed and partial view angels—whose dominions are public buildings, not private residences—must gain of human nature and behavior. Crow, who had the curiosity of nine particularly persistent cats, was fascinated by sleeping, by eating, by a thousand details of daily life about which I, for the most part, never even thought, and he was dreadfully offended that I would not let him follow me into my bedroom or the bathroom or, God forbid, the W.C.
Also, although his public, formal manners were perfect, as angels’ manners always were, I had discovered that he had no real understanding of how to treat someone with whom he did not have a strictly defined, formal relationship. I often caught him staring at me as if he had simply no idea what to do with the fact of my existence. It was not that he disliked me or that he did not wish us to be friends. He simply had no idea how and in some ways only the vaguest conception that the thing was possible at all. Everyone knew that angels could speak to each other mind to mind, but Crow’s behavior made me wonder just what kind of communication that was.
Thus, I did not take offense and said merely, “Trust me, if I’m ill, you will know about it.”
“All right,” said Crow, rather in the manner of one accepting a promise, and left me alone with my tea and toast and boiled egg. But I had barely reached for The Times, bracing myself as always for the complaints about the I.A.F.’s ineffectualness, when there was a sharp staccato knocking on the front door.
Crow’s head came up sharply and eagerly. I watched him tracking the activity downstairs as Jennie emerged from the back of the house and answered the door. I could only distinguish the heavy thump of the bolt being drawn, but I had already learned that Crow’s hearing was exceptionally acute and that the concept of “eavesdropping” meant about as much to him as it did to a fish. By the time I could hear someone’s feet mounting the stairs, Crow was already regarding the door with pleased anticipation. He barely gave the visitor a chance to knock before he called, “Come in!”
The man who opened the door was short and stocky. In face as much as in body he resembled a bulldog, having a heavy jaw, a rather square forehead, and a prizefighter’s much broken nose. His dark hair was slicked straight back and flat to his skull. He wore a blue serge suit that was only just beginning to be shabby and square-toed black leather shoes without the slightest pretense of fashion about them. His hat, already in his hand, was the bowler it had surely been destined from birth to be.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Crow. “Do you have something for me?”
“I think I might,” said the visitor.
“Do you want me to leave?” I said, reaching for my cane with a certain amount of dread. Crow certainly had every right to use our sitting room for a private conversation, but short of shutting myself in my bedroom like a naughty child, there was nowhere I could go, and I was in no condition for a long, bracing walk.
“No,” said Crow. He had turned his unnerving, searching stare on me, a thing I had by no means gotten used to. “You were an Armed Forces doctor. You must know a great deal about unnatural death.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Splendid!” His smile was like a crack of lightning, and he turned back to the little man with the bowler. “What can I do for you?”