Page 154 of The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
AB:Follow me. We can’t get there the way I used to, the road’s been rebuilt. But I know another route into the fields.
AB:[You walk for a bit without talking. EC] Stop, stop. This is it.
OM:You used to run throughthere?
AB:It’s an old pedestrian subway from when a much older pub stood on the Master Brewer site. This underpass was made so people from the houses back there didn’t have to cross a busy road on their way to and from it. But the pub became a hotel with a car park, the roundabout became a flyover and an intersection with its own pedestrian subway, so the passageway fell out of use. My cousins brought me here once. I was only about six, but remember so clearly that detail in the cement of the archway. It’s still visible.
OM:Holly. Holly leaves and berries. Mistletoe.
AB:A festive arch. If I hook that tree, you snap the branches off with the shears. [The next bit is just you guys clearing weeds out of the way. EC]
OM:Lower.
AB:Yep.
OM:Hasn’t been cleared in decades. Ow! You thorny bastard!
OM:[Silence for a bit. EC] The shit is that? Mand. Mand! MAND!
AB:Keepstill! I’ve got it. It’s gone.
OM:Phew. If that bit me, I’d have anti-social superpowers and no friends.
AB:I think that’s it. See if I can squeeze in.
OM:Yeah, but will I?
AB:[A little while later. EC] Here we go.
OM:Wait. Here.
AB:What’s that?
OM:Obsidian. Protection in unknown places. Keep it in your pocket.
AB:…Thanks.
OM:I smell foxes.
AB:This is another of those places. Like Alperton. You can hear the traffic and trains as people whizz past overhead. All going somewhere else.
OM:A crossroads. Neither here nor there. Where there’s a weakness in the fabric between worlds, and anything can happen.
AB:Well, nothing grows. No light, no water. It means the wallsare preserved. Look. [You both pause here. EC] The symbol for Gabriel. Blue paint. Thirty years old.
OM:You remember this from back then?
AB:Not at all. I was here before the angels. Why paint this down here?
OM:This is an assembly. Like the warehouse thirteen years later. A place angels come together to intensify their energy. There has to be some sort of psychic portal here.
AB:Ol, can you check the rest of the wall for angel symbols? My eyesight is worse in this light. [Footsteps, mumbling and rustling. EC]
OM:No. Nothing. Not even regular graffiti.
AB:A single angel symbol. Gabriel was on his own, then. With Holly. But what did they plan to do? Destroy an earlier Antichrist?
OM:[He whispers this bit. EC] The remaining angels are all in hiding. Jonah in a monastery, Gabriel in prison, and Holly wherever. They all know something. This here was the start of it, Mand. The end of days. First the horsemen: War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Then the fifth seal: religious persecution. The sixth seal: climate change, and the seventh and final seal … when the angels assemble for the silence that precedes the second coming of Christ. [You’re both silent for a long time. EC]
