*

the eighth day

*

For all things come to pass on the day of decision,
on the day of judgment, at the word of Adonai:
and as all things were done when he created the world
and commanded all that is therein and it was done
-- even so shall it be in the last days;

- the apocalypse of peter

*

It was slow like a honey-drip, out of the comb and unthinned by water, a dam on the intravenous tube that gave no nourishment that counted. The child was dead. Their child. Their covenant. So it had perhaps not been intended, but so it had come to pass, the bringer the squealing, smoky chained wheels of a lorry fishtailed out of control on the oil-grease of the macadam. So there was death, and in three days there had been no resurrection. The miracles were held back; the fount had run dry, and the last days crept by them silently, still as the final quiet, a tide that does nothing but rise.

Demeter Serraffield perversely finished the little mulberry scarf, knitted at a size meant to fit a boy and not a man, and began work on a knit cap, meant to match the scarf, heedless and colorlessly she worked, through a dozen formal meetings meant to determine the psychological fitness of her only daughter and the man who was father of her grandchild. Her voice had been heard, or rather not heard, and they had not listened, as surely as if their ears had been smote off, and the line had been toed in the sand. The time had come. The time had passed. The time was passing and it was as if it were some great and cosmic symphony arranging itself around her, a deluge from the firmament, where she might arrange one thing here, or move things to suit there, and alter the course a very little, but do nothing to stem the onrushing weight of the flood that would drown them for forty days and forty nights unto an uncountable reckoning.

Only it would not be water this time. Water she knew. It was the blood of life, the blood of everything, salty warm like amniotic fluid. Water was womb death. It would not be water.

It would be fire.

Azrael, having come to his final decision, moved with a rediscovered purpose, prowling and marking, spinning like a great spider, a great black dog, or perhaps even a jackal. His eyes still hollow, yet now burning fire like coals set to light in a furnace, a fuel that did not exhaust itself, renewing like an Exodus bush, feeding deep from the pool of his soul and the great chasm there. He spoke to no one save Jibreel, the thin whisper of his long leather coat against the floor the only tell of his part in the greater mystery. When Gabriel stopped to speak with him, he only stared at her deep as if he knew already what was to come; as if he had determined it himself, or at least welcomed it on, the sweet lotus-smell of oblivion. Gabriel did not often stop to speak with him. He left her heels too cold, as if she had gone barefoot over tundra, or down into the cold belly of the world, polaris ambilicus.

Jibreel wore a white shawl made of the finest lace, some present of a long-ago Christmas past, brought back from Istanbul or Rome or New York, tomorrow's Babylon; likewise she also did not often speak, thumbs softly rifling the pages of her borrowed manuscripts: Infancy gospels in Greek or what would have been Vulgate, had councils sat differently once in the ever-near past. She was pale and drawn, delicate and as finely wrought as her lace, but there was a deep burn in her, a winter-white whisper that lit her up ghostly, aurora australis.

Gabriel could not find the words in her throat knit of linen; could not find the words as father-to-son-to-son and mother-to-daughter-to-son. This she left slick and lost, ice cubes in oil, and when they sat in the land of Nod, she went away from the both of them and did not speak.

The child was dead cornsilk, arrayed in all the majesty that the medical practice allowed, haloed by electrodes still nestled in his pale film of corposant hair. Epsilon Epsilon Gamma; Glasgow Scale Four, a magical number; a holy number: Tetragrammaton, the number of the gospels: the lion, the ox, the man, and the eagle; Number the horsemen four: white, red, black, and pale; Number the directions four: north, south, east, and west; Number the seasons four: Winter, Summer, Spring, and Autumn; Number the suits four: Pentacles, Wands, Swords, and Cups; Number the elements four: Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water. Number the archangels four: Suriel, Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel. It was starling feathers tied to little bits of string and copper.

Sympathetic magic.

Behold, Israel, for the lamb come from Adonai is dead, and let us all lament and tear of our hair, for the time before cannot come again.

Now they did not leave, curled close and still, Azrael sleepless as a snake, one eye open. Jibreel was forever busy in her fragments, the heresies, the revelations cast out, the whisper of century thin parchment that had no beat of time against the pulse of the Apocalypse, who had walked the hill of Golgatha before it was raised -- place of the skulls. They were all skulls now, grinning rictus like Death who was his father and sat at the end of the hall, eyes closed, reed-hollow arms folded over his chest and waited for the note.

Seven days of tribulation.

The rock on which she built her church, stone and earth and the ground before, he was always a flicker in the corner of her eye, ceaselessly hunting for something, perhaps their salvation. It was a reversal. Common times it was they who were the manic burst of movement and he who was stone-still-silent -- but now they sat like reliquaries, bones and ash and bits of linen, waiting for the judgment -- and he was the only one who moved. This was his ground and he knew it, but even he did not chance to cross the threshold into their space. In the end, he was waiting too.

Seven lamps.

Even rage was still, although he could have ridden a red horse as was common in the telling. He sat with his head bowed and thought of summers in South Bend and of sleeping bunked with his sister and did not consider the screams of the world judged, for those were not his to consider. He thought only of his family, before and behind, as was and as might and hoped desperately for a miracle; Lazarus-time begun again. No miracles came.

Seven stars.

Gabriel sat near Eden, hands folded over unfinished knitting, and waited for the end.

Seven angels before the throne.

They made no sound when they came, the pale horsemen, as if sound had long passed out of the nature of the world. Four of them: neurologist, psychologist, consulting trauma specialist, assistant neurosurgeon, coming to deliver the final judgment on the world. They stopped before the door, solemn and with gentle embarrassment. Gabriel raised her eyes and knew.

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

It was time and it passed through them like a ripple, like cranes rising in mass migration. She folded her arms over her chest and they moved.

Burnt up in a span of seconds that passed as the door swung closed, she felt the hum and hiss and felt the ozone crackle in the air, her wings folded behind her so they could all pass in the space of the corridor, a garden of ages born and dead in her footsteps as she passed, and the corridor behind filled with cherubim: elapidae, herpestidae, mustelidae -- they were all of the same family: hers.

It was white hot fire that blew the door off that room, and a sound like heaven splitting, torn asunder: the last ringing clarion cry. It was the final mercy, and she did not have to look to know that the sun was black as sackcloth and that the moon had turned to blood.

It was almost too hot to look at, the black-white-ash burn of the son of Samael, all of it going at once, the air screaming around him as his last burn pushed deep and hot to the sky. It was not containable. It could not be containable. It was two steps to touch him. It was two steps to touch him, then one as she stretched out her fingers -- the last note of a song played all out of order.

There was one moment of pure, still whiteness, where the only movement was Jibreel bowing her head.

And then there was nothing.

And Gabriel jolted as if she had been pumped full of adrenaline, her blouse cold-sweat plastered to the chair behind her, and she looked quietly at the child and listened to the atonal beat of his heart.

It was coming, and she did not know how to shift what would pass.

*