We angels obey because we choose to obey. And so do his creatures. They love their louche lord, their Prince of the Powers of the Air, they love the work they do for him, and now they swarm in the night air around me like moths, reporting my movements to that nameless demon, their immediate master, who struggles so hard to keep me from accomplishing the fulfillment of God’s design. I take him, that demon, to be some minor baron in the Prince of Darkness’s vassalage, some puffed-up satrap, arrogant beglerbeg of the middle mists, powerful, but not, deo volente, so powerful as I.
(I would not be able to stand up to Lucifer himself, and I know it, but so does he, and so does He. The Prince of Darkness, even before the Fall, was a power and a might second only to God, which is what led him to his pride and his destruction in the first place. But if Lucifer were to confront me, it would no longer be me he was confronting. I would at once be retired, so that God Himself could take my place; and in every direct encounter between those two Masters it is Lucifer who has lost, it is he who has retired from the battle in shame and pain and degradation, forked tail between cloven-hoofed legs. Like the limited wars on other people’s territories that the so-called Great Powers have indulged themselves in over the last half-century of Earth’s little history, it is only through proxies that my Master and His Opponent can contend. Lucifer will surely try to cheat, will cast about for advantage, but he will not try to overwhelm me; that would bring into play a truly Great Power.)
No, it is only that nameless hospodar that I have to contend with, only he who has taken up arms against me. His master believes, or at least hopes, that this deputy devil will be enough to thwart me in doing God’s work. But it is my firm belief that, with God’s help, and in His gleaming Light, I will be enabled to perform His work, obey His commands, accomplish His desires, amen.
And for now, it is time to separate that avatar of the demon, Brother Rush (a name rich in association), from my quintet. Leaving Andy Harbinger seated quietly beside Susan Carrigan in Quad Theater #3 on West 13th Street, watching Night Fall (a film noir of current popularity), I made my way to Stockbridge and assumed corporate form in the darkness of a church parking lot not far from Maria Elena Auston’s house.
The shape I had chosen to take was that of the man who had helped Kwan escape the police in Hong Kong, and who later rode the plane with Pami; an early version of Andy Harbinger, really. Two of my five people already have reason to trust me. It would be preferable to have their confidence, while I am ridding them of Rush. As Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval Intelligence, as the documents in my wallet testified, I would already have the presumption of authority, so it should be possible to perform the extraction of Rush from the group without the necessity of doing anything gaudy. Or at least I certainly hoped so.
I walked the two and a half blocks of curving suburban street — an early sign of sophistication in humans, I have noticed, is a distaste for straight lines — and as I approached the Auston house I saw that the drapes were open at the large dining room window, presenting my quintet at meal as though Hogarth had done a cover for some supermarket family magazine.
But where was Rush? The others sat and ate and talked and brooded — Kwan occasionally took tiny painful sips from a glass of pale orange liquid — and a partially eaten meal waited at a sixth place, but Rush was not to be seen.
I sought him with my mind, but couldn’t find him. He had to be present, because of that meal in front of that empty chair. Had his rustling claque in the air above my head warned him of my presence?
I didn’t want to declare myself to the others until I had fixed the position of Rush. I partially crossed the lawn, to its darkest segment, away from the light-spill out that dining room window and also clear of streetlamp illumination, and there I stood and watched, and waited.
Why were they so cheerful? By now, bitterness and sorrow should have made those five much more silent and introspective. It must be their companionship that was raising their spirits, but unfortunately I couldn’t give them a properly disheartening solitude; they had to work together. Would they do the right thing when the time came? Yes, they would, they would, there was no real question. I would turn the screw until they did do what I wanted. Of their own free will, of course.
I was careless, I admit it. My attention had become too fixed on my five operatives, and insufficiently on my current metempsychosis, Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval Intelligence, and on the whereabouts of Rush! Before I knew it, the attack was well under way.
Damn him! I tried to take a step, to see another portion of the dining room, but my feet wouldn’t move. Only then did I realize what he was up to. The Brad Wilson toes had become roots, digging down through his shoes into the soil of the lawn, burrowing down and down, clutching at rocks, entwining with the roots of other trees, luxuriating in the groundwater—
Other trees! Already the flesh of my ankles and shins was bark, already an irresistible pull drew my arms upward, already my joints were stiffening. In alarm, I tried to flee this body, but the chittering of the thousand thousand tiny counter-cherubs all around my leafing head imprisoned me. They couldn’t hold me in, not by themselves, but with the power of Rush as well I might be defeated.
Defeated! This corporeal form was merely a temporary shape, but it was the permanent me, made up of my own atoms. (We do not inhabit and possess Earthly creatures, as the fiends do, as Rush was doing now, but make our shapes from ourselves.) If the demon and its million squeaking parasites could hold me, the essence of me, inside this terrestrial vessel until they completed the transformation, until they turned me into a vegetable, with a vegetable’s brain, I would never break free, never be Ananayel again, never have power to be anything but what they would have made me: an inexplicable tree on a suburban lawn.
Failure was possible. And if I failed, what? There was no doubt, not the slightest doubt, that I would be abandoned to the effects of my failure. I would be encased here, lost here, shut up mindless inside this woody crypt for as long as it took Him to send another effectuator, a worthier deputy, to succeed where I had faltered, and at last to end this world.
And then? I would end with it, of course.
But now, now, what of now? Soon, in that theater in New York City, Night Fall would come to its expected end — the girl is innocent, it’s obvious — and Susan would rise, but what would happen to Andy Harbinger? There isn’t enough animation in him to get him on his feet and out of the theater, much less to take him through the complications of the rest of the evening. There would be confusion, then shock, then an ambulance. To the hospital Andy Harbinger’s apparently living corpus would be taken, and I had not bothered to be meticulous about that corpus. It doesn’t contain everything a human body would be expected to contain. Here and there, I did short circuits, took the easy way out. And now? Expose that body to emergency room staff? Confine myself to a severely abbreviated life span as a tree? Fail my God?
I still had teeth. I ground them as I forced this head to turn on its stiffening neck. Where was Rush? Where was Rush?
At the curb was parked Frank’s Toyota. Its exterior left-side mirror was angled so that I could just get a glimpse into it. Among other things reflected in that mirror was not Rush but a Buick parked on a driveway down the block, on the other side of the street. Narrowing my focus, peering through the Toyota’s exterior mirror into that Buick, into the interior rearview mirror of the Buick, my view included the plate-glass living room window of the house next door to the Auston house. The room behind that window was dark; the window was not a perfect mirror, but it would do, and in it was reflected the Toyota again. And from that angle, in the driver’s window of the Toyota, very dimly, very darkly, hunched low in shrubbery around the side of the Auston house, there was Rush! Gibbering with glee.