“I’m sorry...could you say that one more time for me, please?” Graham said first; each stuttered word was interspaced with stifled laughter. The kind you get at all the most inopportune moments throughout your life; church or the school assembly were always the popular ones, not to mention business meetings or remembrance services.
“Yes, with pleasure,” Raguel said in a stoic fashion. “We are Angels of the Lord and we have been sent here to gather you all.” The words were cold, emotionless; they smelt foul on the air coming out of Raguel’s mouth and they felt even fouler when they entered the ears of the feasting group.
“A-angels. As in wings and halo angels?” Helen stuttered and mumbled. Her voice lacked the mocking undertones that had accompanied Graham’s initial statement, and instead made her sound rather fearful.
“Well, your conception of us is a fool’s mindset and depicts us in a certain way, but for the sake of your own understanding, then yes. Angels with wings and halos is exactly what we are,” Raguel said.
It was obvious to all that he was in charge, the person to deal with, to come to when you wanted to file any grievances. The others stood stock still behind him, and if they hadn’t all moved earlier at some point in time after their arrival, everyone in the group would have been forgiven for thinking them to be statues.
They don’t even blink, Marcus thought.
“Bullshit. Tell us the truth. I mean, you pulled us out so I guess we are indebted to you to a certain degree, but don’t bullshit us.” Graham rose from behind the table, his chair grating on the floor, eliciting a sound not unlike long gnarled yellow fingernails scraping the top layer from a blackboard in a classroom filled with unruly children.
“You dare question us? Call me a liar, you peasant?” Raguel roared. He threw his hands out and the room began to shake as if an earthquake had picked a most poetic moment to release its rage. The lights dimmed and Raguel seemed to grow, rising into the air. His feet left the floor as his face reddened with a controlled yet imposing rage. His eyes were wide, his lips clenched tight, and electricity seemed to snap and crackle in the air around them.
Sammy, in his blind and rather disadvantaged state, jumped as a charge hit his arm and jolted through his body. The curtain that hung before the windows was thrown back. It grabbed all of their attention, with the exception of Graham, who seemed to have his gaze held by the furious Raguel. The angel’s face had continued to darken and now looked like somebody who had been hung to the point of suffocation only to be revived at the last second. Outside the sky too had darkened, as if someone had flipped the theoretical switch and brought darkness forward but a few hours. The ground seemed to tremble and even in the near night conditions they could see the thick bubbling thunderhead clouds that had gathered overhead. A fierce wind surged down the street, whistling through the eaves of the other buildings; it kicked sand up from street and battered it against the window like a fine rain. Mini tornados of gritty dust raced along the road and disappeared into the night.
Thunder rumbled along like the wheels of a carriage and the pounding hooves of the steeds that pulled it across the plains. The wind’s whistling had turned into an eerie groaning; a cross between a creaking door and a more classical impression of a ghost. The thunder rumbled again, expressing its own obvious annoyance at the insolent attitude shown by Graham and his group.
All of them could feel the tension growing in the room. It pressed against them all like the G-force in an accelerating aircraft. Outside, lightning flashed, lighting everything for a short moment. The buildings’ silhouettes were traced in a phosphorescent light, which remained once the lighting was gone and darkness returned to the world, creating a negative impression of the desolate world that awaited them...or so they feared it was.
With a demonstration of incredible self-control, Raguel calmed. His face returned to the normal pale coloration, the light returned to the world, first moving from midnight to late dusk through to a dawn style lull before the sun re-emerged and the town took on its old Wild West look once again.
The others felt the change and were without any shadow of a doubt impressed with the sheer power that the men...no, angels – it would take time to get used to the word – possessed. Graham somehow seemed either less than impressed or completely taken aback by the display, for he remained standing where he was, staring down the men, Raguel in particular. It was a look Marcus knew well, one he had seen many times, both in the ring and reflected in his own face by the mirror in his dressing room before and after his appearance. Although the latter was often less intense and more ponderous, considering not only his actions and reactions during the fight, but also his future, and the normal questions of doubt that arose inside him. Why he did it? He never had an answer.
Raguel held Graham’s stare and matched it with one of his own, and the thing that struck both Marcus and Helen was how human it looked. Unlike the previous image that had captured them, this stare, while being without any doubt cold and harsh, was undeniably human.
“You are a cynical man, Graham Williams. You are responsible for more death than anybody in this room and yet you question the existence of a God the most. So did you kill because you wanted to, because you enjoyed it? Many men in your position with no faith would have turned and fled or allowed others to engage,” Raguel said, his voice now calm, all traces of the rage which had just consumed him was gone.
“It was a war, it was kill or be killed.” Graham’s comeback tasted stale in his mouth, words used all too often, words which had now been reduced to nothing more than meaningless syllables uttered on an exiled breath. “The war is why I question. Men killing each other, turning on each other, rape, murder of innocent bystanders, people just trying to live their lives. Good people for the most. Believers. Where was your God then?” Graham asked. He had no plans to get involved in a theological debate with a man who called himself an angel and so far seemed to have the goods to prove his story, but he felt the anger rush through him and was unable to hold it back.
Raguel smiled, a sight even more unnervingly human than the cold stare, and behind him the three other angels chuckled amongst themselves, like schoolchildren hearing someone say a dirty word.
“Well I could give you the answer to that, but, to be honest, it’s more fun to keep it a secret.” He laughed. Neither an evil laugh, nor the frolicking playful laugh one might expect from an angel. It was the laugh of a private joke of a secret piece of knowledge that people would never guess, nor would science prove.
Marcus looked from Graham to Raguel and then back and forth between the two several times. He could see the tension in Graham’s face and the look of near boredom in Raguel’s, and so he decided that it was time to intervene.
“Gentlemen, forgive our skepticism over your true identities. It is just that when certain things are introduced to you in life, you have a certain degree of expectation that goes with it. Thunder and lightning, for example: you don’t expect anything else to follow that first thunderclap than the next wave of lightning. Were you to look outside and see snow falling, you would stare in disbelief despite the real possibility of it occurring on a regular basis.” Marcus was in full flow, using his best courtroom language, hoping that it would sound, if not respectful, at least sincere. “Let us do this. We will assume that you are indeed Angels of the Lord, sent here to pull us from Hell, but I ask you, at least allow us some time to judge you or at least time to adjust to the notion that you don’t all carry harps and live on the clouds like a child’s cartoon would have us believe.”
Raguel looked from Graham to Marcus and back to Graham again. “He doesn’t believe, he doesn’t want to believe and, to be honest, I wonder why we had to save him in the first place. You keep him under control or I’ll cast him back into the fallen world for good. I’ll bury him in such a deep level surrounded by his own nightmares that he will be wishing for the churchyard and the sounds of the pretty young Dutch girl screaming.” Turning his attention back to Marcus, Raguel continued. “I will not pander to your petty will. Your concept of perception will need to change, and so it changes now. You will listen to me. We pulled you out, but I will throw you back without warning should you so much as think about questioning us again. We have a lot to discuss – or should I say I have a lot to say and you all to hear. So let us begin, shall we?” With that he clapped his hands, creating a wall of sound like cannon fire, and everything began to change.