In the Flesh Read online

  With a little yelp, I jumped and opened my eyes, splashing water onto the tiled floor and barely avoiding a mouthful. I must have drifted off to sleep and dreamed, though I couldn’t remember what. I could only recall the rise of goose flesh beneath a feather touch, the exhalation of humid breath whispered against my ear, but if there had been words, I didn’t remember them.

  I lay there in a rising cloud of steam, holding my breath, listening, trying to hear something other than the hammering of my pulse. The scent of roses receded and with it the urge to linger. Suddenly I felt tired. I dried myself and stumbled to my makeshift bedroom. Barely noticing that there was no sheet on the mattress, I fell into bed and was instantly asleep.

  In the morning I awoke to the smell of a fry-up, which was a good thing, because I was ravenous. I dressed quickly and found Annie in the kitchen looking fragile, but better.

  She smiled up at me from cooking eggs. “Good morning. Sorry about last night. I forget sometimes how much stamina it takes to…” She blushed and returned her attention to the eggs.

  “Quite an animal, is he?”

  She chuckled softly as she scooped eggs and bacon onto plates and brought them to the table. “Let’s just say he’s—”

  “Insatiable? I mean, last night you said you thought he was God, so I figured he must be really amazing in bed.”

  While I shoveled down my breakfast, she only held her tea mug between cupped hands and smiled down into the steam. “I said that?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  She didn’t answer, only clenched her jaw and stared into her cup.

  Annie was the hands-down winner of the too-much-information award when it came to her love life, and her reluctance to talk frightened me, so I quickly changed the subject. “What’s the plan for today? Retail therapy? I hear there’s a handbag sale at Debenhams.”

  She picked up her plate and scraped her untouched food into the rubbish bin, careful to avoid my gaze. “Susan, I honestly don’t feel up to going out today. I just really need to rest. Would you mind going without me? I’ll be all right. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  By the time I finished my food and was ready to go, Annie was once again fast asleep, curled in her nest at the foot of the altar.

  Outside, the smell of burning rubbish stung my eyes and the back of my throat.

  I had little enthusiasm for the handbag sale, nor for lingering at the make-up counter. Instead I found myself back at the Starbucks, Mac open, researching God’s love life, which turned out to be a long history of seducing humans.

  Zeus visited Danae in a shower of gold. He seduced Leda in the form of a swan. Eros came to Psyche in the dead of night, forbidding her to look upon his face. Hades dragged Persephone down to the Underworld. The Virgin Mary was impregnated by the god of the Bible. In the New Testament, Christ is the bridegroom, and the church his bride. And the list went on and on. Perhaps even the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was just another way for divinity to experience flesh.

  I had always loved mythology, and I’d read all these stories before. I’d just never put them together to get the whole picture. And though I was seeing an aspect of divinity that I found rather disturbing, I couldn’t help feeling there was still a piece of the puzzle missing.

  I suppose I should have felt relieved. Annie wasn’t as unusual as I’d thought. God was the ultimate stalker, and he didn’t seem to be very faithful to his lovers. Just Annie’s type. I tried not to think about the implications of my experience in the bath the previous night. After all, it was just mythology. I’d had a lot of wine, and there’s never any accounting for my vivid imagination. After all, I’m a writer. I make my living as a teller of tales.

  “What are you reading?”

  I jumped at the sound of Annie’s voice and quickly minimized the page. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “I’m feeling better.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  She leaned down and whispered next to my ear, “My lover’s God, remember? You can’t hide from him.”

  I barely had time to register shock before she reached down and restored the page. “Trying to learn a little bit more about him, are we?” She smiled at the monitor and nodded knowingly. “None of this does him justice. He’s the Hound of Heaven. He’s always pursuing those he loves, and there’s no escaping. Once he’s set his eyes on you, he’ll do whatever it takes to make you his own.”

  I suddenly felt cold.

  Chapter Three

  Back at Chapel House, Annie went straight to bed, meaning I was faced with the prospect of another creepy night alone. “I think I might go home,” I said, sitting on the pallet next to her, watching her struggle to stay awake. “You don’t feel well, and I’m only disturbing you. If I leave now, I can be home before midnight.” Besides, I’d be glad to get away from the rubbish burning, which suddenly smelled particularly foul.

  “No! You can’t leave.” She grabbed my arm in a grip that was surprisingly strong. Her voice was thin, breathless, punctuated by the racing of her pulse. “Please, Susan, I need you here with me. Please don’t go. I’ll be better tomorrow. I promise.”

  Once I had agreed to stay, she relaxed back into her pillows. Her eyes fluttered shut, and sleep was so instant that for a second I thought she had fainted, or worse yet, she was dead. There was no denying that, in the pale light, she looked like a corpse.

  I brushed my fingertips over her cheek, smoothing her hair behind her ears, where I could see the assurance of a shuddering pulse against the translucent skin of her throat. If I watched closely, I would almost swear I could see the blood coursing through the turquoise veins just beneath the surface. She moaned softly, her eyelids fluttered, and the rise and fall of her chest indicated the deep even breath of sleep. Slowly, so as not to wake her, I stood and made my reluctant way back to my makeshift room.

  I pulled up a mindless novel on my iPhone, something light and funny. I didn’t want anything with even the slightest bit of creep factor. I just wanted to be well distracted until I could fall asleep, which I was pretty sure wouldn’t happen any time soon. I was wrong. Sleep overtook me nearly as quickly and completely as it had poor Annie.

  Long toward morning I woke with a start. The room was awash in the scent of roses, and I was certain someone had called my name. “Annie?” I half whispered. There was no reply, no sound other than the anxious breathing that must surely have been my own. Surely.

  The pitch black of the room pressed in all around me like another presence, so close that I felt if I switched on the light, I would suddenly come face to face with it. The bile of panic rose in my throat. I threw off the duvet and fumbled for my phone, dropping it on the mattress before I could finally slice the blackness with a sliver of light. The drop cloth curtains trembled on either side of me, no doubt from my own panicked actions, and the smell of roses thickened.

  Careful to keep the sliver of light, I slipped into my robe and hurried to check on Annie. Even in the stairwell I could hear her moans. As I neared the transept the air felt charged and heavy, like that moment in a storm just before lightning strikes. The hairs on my neck rose and goose flesh prickled up my spine. I held my breath as I tiptoed closer. The plastic drop cloths had been shoved onto the floor in a heap, and there in the moonlight she lay, thrashing atop the altar, her hair splayed around her head, night shirt pushed up over her hips. She arched her back and cried out, reaching her arms upward to something I couldn’t see.

  I wanted to run. Instead I stood frozen, bathed in cold sweat, waiting for logic to explain everything away as the moonlight around her seemed to explode and coalesce with her ecstasy. The smell of jasmine cloyed at my throat, making my head ache.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the urge to flee finally took control. Heart pounding, I stepped back, hoping to leave unnoticed, when suddenly I felt a rush of wind against my face and breathed the musky odor of sex. I stumbled, unable to hold back a small yelp. My phone slipped
through my fingers and bounced under a pew as the scent of jasmine gave way to roses.

  In the heavy press of darkness, I half ran, half fell down the hall back toward my room, tripping over the edge of a drop cloth thrown across the floor and coming down hard on both knees with a breathless curse. I pulled myself to my feet, gasping for oxygen, groping at the wall for the switch, desperate for light—any kind of light. Though I was disturbed by what I had seen, I was more disturbed by the fact that it had aroused me even through my fear. As my eyes adjusted, light coming in from the small window in the door of the makeshift kitchen bathed the room in shades of gray.

  Another gust of wind blew the door open with a loud crash. I yelped and jumped forward to force it shut. Then I could have sworn I heard my name, called out with such longing that I couldn’t stop myself. With hands slippery from nervous sweat, I fumbled the door open again and stepped out onto the patio. The clutter of terracotta pots looked like strange squat specters in the dance of moonlight and shadow.

  Making my way past derelict strawberry jars, several bags of ancient compost and a wheel-less wheelbarrow, I emerged into a large garden overgrown with weeds. It was the deconsecrated churchyard, I reminded myself with a shiver. In the bright moonlight, I stood holding my breath. Listening.

  Annie had taken twisted pleasure in speculating about the graveyard that had once been the back garden. She had imagined exhumed medieval skeletons taken to museums to be studied and cataloged. She had imagined underground catacombs where ghosts of priests and murderers alike scurried on secret missions, some sinister, some holy.

  I shuddered at the thought and pulled the robe tighter around me. I had not found her speculation amusing then, and I found it even less so now. I found nothing about this place amusing.

  Fighting my way through a tangle of ivy, I came to a stone bench that looked like it might well have belonged in a graveyard. Not wanting to go back inside Chapel House, I sat down, hoping desperately that if I thought long enough, I’d find a rational explanation for everything that had happened, or I’d wake up and discover it had all been a bad dream. Staying in places with intriguing pasts often brought me unsettling dreams.

  I smelled roses again—old roses, not any sort of modern hybrid. Only old roses would smell so strong and so sweet amid the rank growth of weeds. As I breathed in the scent that seemed to be coming from just over my shoulder, I felt a humid breeze on my neck, brushing my nape, like breath exhaled with the settling of a kiss. The leaves rustled around me, and the bench was suddenly in shadow. With a start, I turned to hear the sound of footsteps retreating down the path.

  “Annie? Hello?” I clambered to my feet and followed the rustle of leaves, the scent of roses always just ahead of me. “Annie, this isn’t funny, all right? This isn’t funny!”

  I hadn’t remembered the garden being so large. It felt as though I wandered the paths for hours. My spine constantly prickled, but a quick glance over my shoulder always revealed no one following me. The paving stones were mossy and slick beneath my bare feet. I stumbled along, ignoring the scratch of bramble and the sting of nettle, shoving my way through leaves damp with dew until I broke through, as though I’d just pushed aside a curtain. With a gasp, I stopped short, nearly losing my footing on the moss.

  The smell of roses was overwhelming. The sense of not being alone crawled along my spine on little insect feet. In a small copse set between aging lilac bushes taller than my head and a gnarled hawthorn hedge that might once have been part of a formal garden, he loomed over me. I swallowed back a scream just before it could escape, as I realized he was an angel, or at least a statue of one.

  Slightly more than human size, his weathered marble toes barely touched a low plinth, as though he were just alighting. One large hand was extended toward me in invitation. The other rested on his chest, over his heart. He was naked except for a sculpted veil of stone that covered his groin. His perfect form shone silver in the moonlight, muscles tensed in anticipation, empty eyes locked on mine.

  With my heart battering my ribs, I stood frozen there next to him as something ancient, something primal, moved over my skin, like the brush of spider webs and dust motes. What might have begun as a caress became an invasion as it thrust its way deeper, into secret places, places in myself where even I never dare go. Whatever it was, it knew me, it understood me, and its longing for me was terrible.

  The scream that echoed through the garden must have been mine, though by the time it happened, it was no longer an adequate expression of what was happening to me. I was pushed to the ground—or perhaps I fell. I barely felt the bruise of cold stone against my buttocks and spine, lost as I was in the realization that what I had feared, what I had disbelieved, was now upon me, and I could hide nothing from it because there was nothing left in me that it didn’t already know.

  It closed around me, blocking out the moon, smelling of roses, hammering into me until I was certain I would break apart. And once I was certain it no longer mattered, I stopped fighting. I stopped pleading. My words became sand in my throat. And when I stopped fighting, the rock solid crushing of my soul became a gentle touch, a brush of full lips against my own, a cupping of breasts and groin. It brought with it an awareness that in the midst of my own darkness, there was need, there was desire, there was lust as dark as whatever it was, whoever it was that held me.

  I stopped struggling and gave into it. The night convulsed like leaves in a storm, and I was falling through the bottom of the world, falling forever with nothing to stop me, nothing to slow my descent, and no knowledge of what lay beneath. And that too no longer mattered.

  Chapter Four

  I woke up with a jerk that made my neck pop. I was lying naked, curled around the pillow in the middle of the mattress in the makeshift guest room. The tight space that had been heavy and humid last night was now freezing cold and I was shivering. I gulped oxygen as though I hadn’t breathed all night.

  Then a wave of relief washed over me. I sobbed out loud. “It was only a dream! It wasn’t real. Dear God, it wasn’t real!” My throat felt like I’d been eating ground glass and my head ached. Everything ached. Only a dream! Thank God! Thank heaven! Thank fuck! Thank everything!

  In the gray morning light that bathed the windowless excuse for a room, I crawled off the mattress and shoved my way into yesterday’s clothes, thrown carelessly across my travel bag when I’d come to bed last night. Then I frantically began to pack. Dream or not, I was out of here as soon as I could extricate myself—politely or otherwise—from Annie. I wasn’t her keeper. I couldn’t make her do what she didn’t want to. I’d call her mother. That’s what I’d do! I had her mother’s number somewhere. I’d call her to take charge, then I’d hope for the best. From a safe distance.

  I’d just finished washing my face and running a toothbrush over my teeth when I heard a commotion down the hall.

  “I told you to stay away! I told you I didn’t want you here. Do I have to call the police?”

  I threw open the bathroom door and raced down the hall to the kitchen where the noise was coming from. Annie stood at the door, robe wrapped carelessly around her, holding a butcher knife in one hand and her phone in the other, shaking both at a dark-haired man in faded jeans and an Elvis Lives T-shirt. For some reason the man looked familiar, but then again, how many of Annie’s lovers had pined for her and tried to get back in her good graces after she dissed them? More than a few of them had come to me for advice on how to win Annie’s heart. Jesus! The woman couldn’t be happy with a made-up stalker, she had to have a real one, too!

  “What the hell’s going on here?” I roared, the pent-up helplessness from last night giving way to anger. “You heard her. Get out!” I yelled at the man. But to my surprise, instead of coming to my side, instead of standing shoulder to shoulder with me like she always had, Annie turned the knife on me.

  “And you! You little whore! I was afraid this would happen, Susan, I tried to tell him. I begged him not to bring you he
re, but he said to trust him, to trust you. But how could I trust you? How could I trust anyone with him?”

  “He brought me here? Who brought me here? What the fuck are you talking about?” But even as I asked I was terrified that I already knew.

  She gave me a hard shove, and I found myself stumbling over the threshold, shoved up against the man at the door, who caught me to keep me from falling. “Get out! Get the hell out, both of you. And don’t come back.” Then she slammed the door in our faces.

  “Annie! Annie, wait! We need to—” The smell of burning garbage was suddenly so overwhelming that I gagged and choked for breath.

  The dark-haired man grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from the door and out into the courtyard. With both of us coughing and choking, eyes streaming from smoke we couldn’t see, he half marched, half dragged me through the wrought iron gate and out into the alley behind Chapel House. There, he pulled open the door of a small lorry and tried to shove me inside.

  “Let go of me! Let go!” I squirmed free and nearly fell on my arse as he released his grip and another wave of the burning rubbish reek nearly overwhelmed me. “Who the bloody hell are you?”

  “I’m the fucking builder! Or at least I was. Now get into the damn truck and let’s get out of here before we both suffocate.”

  I did as he said, barely getting the door closed before he revved the engine, shoved the truck into gear and pulled out onto the street, the horrible smell receding in our wake.

  Neither of us said anything until he pulled into a Little Chef off the motorway. He was around the truck and opening the door for me before I could engage with what had happened in the—what was it—just twenty minutes I’d been awake this morning?

  He offered me his hand, and I blinked, horrified to discover that I was blinking back tears. “I don’t have any money. I don’t have anything,” I managed. “It’s all back in Chapel House. Even my phone.”