It was Green Terror, and he had begun to roar ear-splittingly.
“Haven’t you got that damned tiger in?” He screamed, almost falsetto. He shook me like a rag doll.
“He won’t go!” I found myself yelling back. “You’ve got to—”
But he flung me away. I stumbled over the fold-up steps in front of his trailer and crashed into a bone-shaking heap at the bottom. With something between a sob and a curse, Mr. Indrasil strode past me, face mottled with anger and fear.
I got up, drawn after him as if hypnotized. Some intuitive part of me realized I was about to see the last act played out.
Once clear of the shelter of Mr. Indrasil’s trailer, the power of the wind was appalling. It screamed like a runaway freight train. I was an ant, a speck, an unprotected molecule before that thundering, cosmic force.
And Mr. Legere was standing by Green Terror’s cage.
It was like a tableau from Dante. The near-empty cage-clearing inside the circle of trailers; the two men, facing each other silently, their clothes and hair rippled by the shrieking gale; the boiling sky above; the twisting wheatfields in the background, like damned souls bending to the whip of Lucifer.
“It’s time, Jason,” Mr. Legere said, his words flayed across the clearing by the wind.
Mr. Indrasil’s wildly whipping hair lifted around the livid scar across the back of his neck. His fists clenched, but he said nothing. I could almost feel him gathering his will, his life force, his id. It gathered around him like an unholy nimbus.
And, then, I saw with sudden horror that Mr. Legere was unhooking Green Terror’s breezeway—and the back of the cage was open!
I cried out, but the wind ripped my words away.
The great tiger leaped out and almost flowed past Mr. Legere. Mr. Indrasil swayed, but did not run. He bent his head and stared down at the tiger.
And Green Terror stopped.
He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh of conflicting wills centered around the tiger. And the wills were evenly matched.
I think, in the end, it was Green Terror’s own will—his hate of Mr. Indrasil—that tipped the scales.
The cat began to advance, his eyes hellish, flaring beacons. And something strange began to happen to Mr. Indrasil. He seemed to be folding in on himself, shriveling, accordioning. The silk-shirt lost shape, the dark, whipping hair became a hideous toadstool around his collar.
Mr. Legere called something across to him, and, simultaneously, Green Terror leaped.
I never saw the outcome. The next moment I was slammed flat on my back, and the breath seemed to be sucked from my body. I caught one crazily tilted glimpse of a huge, towering cyclone funnel, and then the darkness descended.
When I awoke, I was in my cot just aft of the grainery bins in the all-purpose storage trailer we carried. My body felt as if it had been beaten with padded Indian clubs.
Chips Baily appeared, his face lined and pale. He saw my eyes were open and grinned relievedly. “Didn’t know as you were ever gonna wake up. How you feel?”
“Dislocated,” I said. “What happened? How’d I get here?”
“We found you piled up against Mr. Indrasil’s trailer. The tornado almost carried you away for a souvenir, m’boy.”
At the mention of Mr. Indrasil, all the ghastly memories came flooding back. “Where is Mr. Indrasil? And Mr. Legere?”
His eyes went murky, and he started to make some kind of an evasive answer.
“Straight talk,” I said, struggling up on one elbow. “I have to know, Chips. I have to.”
Something in my face must have decided him. “Okay. But this isn’t exactly what we told the cops—in fact we hardly told the cops any of it. No sense havin’ people think we’re crazy. Anyhow, Indrasil’s gone. I didn’t even know that Legere guy was around.”
“And Green Tiger?”
Chips’ eyes were unreadable again. “He and the other tiger fought to death.”
“Other tiger? There’s no other—”
“Yeah, but they found two of ’em, lying in each other’s blood. Hell of a mess. Ripped each other’s throats out.”
“What—where—”
“Who knows? We just told the cops we had two tigers. Simpler that way.” And before I could say another word, he was gone.
And that’s the end of my story—except for two little items. The words Mr. Legere shouted just before the tornado hit: “When a man and an animal live in the same shell, Indrasil, the instincts determine the mold!”
The other thing is what keeps me awake nights. Chips told me later, offering it only for what it might be worth. What he told me was that the strange tiger had a long scar on the back of its neck.
EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING
John Kessel
John Kessel teaches creative writing and literature at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product. His story collection, Meeting in Infinity, was named a notable book of 1992 by the New York Times Book Review.
Kessel co-edited Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology with James Patrick Kelly. His recent collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories contains the 2008 Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award-winning story “Pride and Prometheus.”
About “Every Angel is Terrifying” he says: “The cat was the only survivor of the family in Flannery O’Connor’s harrowing short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,’ so it was natural for me to carry it along into this story. But being a long-time student of cats (and having been the subject of their indifferent gaze in return), I can believe that they have the power to alter reality in metaphysical, if not physical, ways.”
Railroad watched Bobby Lee grab the grandmother’s body under the armpits and drag her up the other side of the ditch. “Whyn’t you help him, Hiram,” he said.
Hiram took off his coat, skidded down into the ditch after Bobby Lee, and got hold of the old lady’s legs. Together he and Bobby Lee lugged her across the field towards the woods. Her broken blue hat was still pinned to her head, which lolled against Bobby Lee’s shoulder. The woman’s face grinned lopsidedly all the way into the shadow of the trees.
Railroad carried the cat over to the Studebaker. It occurred to him that he didn’t know the cat’s name, and now that the entire family was dead he never would. It was a calico, gray striped with a broad white face and an orange nose. “What’s your name, puss-puss?” he whispered, scratching it behind the ears. The cat purred. One by one Railroad went round and rolled up the windows of the car. A fracture zigzagged across the windshield, and the front passenger’s vent window was shattered. He stuffed Hiram’s coat into the vent window hole. Then he put the cat inside the car and shut the door. The cat put its front paws up on the dashboard and, watching him, gave a pantomime meow.
Railroad pushed up his glasses and stared off toward the woodline where Bobby Lee and Hiram had taken the bodies. The place was hot and still, silence broken only by birdsong from somewhere up the embankment behind him. He squinted up into the cloudless sky. Only a couple of hours of sun left. He rubbed the spot on his shoulder where the grandmother had touched him. Somehow he had wrenched it when he jerked away from her.