This Magnificent Desolation Read Online Free PDF Page A

ever hear.
    The Black Angel will get you—this is what the novitiates tell the children to scare them on nights when the film projector has been set up in the playroom and the cicadas are droning outside in the muggy, tumescent night and the black, glistening trees seem to drip with moisture and insects are falling and crackling on the bug zapper in flashes of strange epileptic light. Later they will hear him making his way from the children’s graveyard and then plodding upon the stone toward their bedrooms. The Black Angel who never sleeps and who looks up at the windows of the sleeping children at night just waiting for the right moment to climb the crumbling stone walls like some misshapen spider, to crawl beneath their barely parted window, leaving a viscous trail upon the sill, and into their bedrooms, where he will spread his great maggot-infested wings in a great dihedral before embracing their souls and pulling them to his black breast.
    Father Toibin rages whenever he discovers the novitiates havebeen talking about Padre Martin de Lupe to the children, who are both shocked and pleased by his maddened fits. After hearing of the most recent macabre tale, he comes into Father Malachy’s morning classroom and, standing before them, looks upon their ashen faces. His voice resonates off the timbers and about the walls:
In whose care do you entrust your bodies and your souls?
    In God’s care
, Duncan and other children chant in unison, and Father Malachy joins in as well, his eyes glistening with fervor.
    In whose love can darkness never take hold?
    In God’s love
, they chorus. His fire feeds their passion, and they feel lifted from their chairs with it. Had he asked, they would have stormed from the room and yoked the nearest novitiate to the Hanging Tree in the manner of Padre de Lupe and of the Old Testament with the Chosen laying waste to the temples of the Idolaters.
    But when the sun goes down and shadows creep across the courtyard and cold comes running from the northern plains, and the lights flicker and the children’s breaths steam the crepuscular light, and the lands that surround the Home seem so vast as to be impenetrable and from their windows they see the vastness of that plain upon which here and there a small farmhouse flickers with a light that seems as distant as the stars, then everything changes.
    When Brother Wilhelm dampens the lantern wicks with a shaking, palsied hand after they have brushed their teeth and said their prayers and climbed into bed, and all light is extinguished, the only thing that remains is the scent of tallow smoke, ash, and wax, and the crucifix that glows blue from the center of the wall. Duncan listens to the whimper of scared children tossing in their sleep, dreaming of the Black Angel and of mothers and fathers who were once there, perhaps, and are now gone, or of those shadowy adult figures who lurk in the dark of their minds and never leave. Perhaps it is a simplelonging for that which they’ve never had, and such an absence makes them call out in the night.
    He imagines what his past must have been like, and there are times when he believes that he can almost will it into existence. He has a mother and even a father, gray, silvery-backed amorphous things that periodically solidify into shapes with limbs and strangely familiar, sad features—he sees them standing in some doorway, his bedroom perhaps, the lamp-lit hallway aglow behind them preventing him from seeing them clearly though he is aware that they are looking in on him and safeguarding him as he leeps—only to drift apart in the ether so that he cannot draw them together again in his mind. He stares at the ceiling of his room and feels his brow tense with the effort to will them back into some acceptable shape, but it is no use; they are gone and he cannot retrieve them. There is the scent of tallow and cigarette smoke—perhaps the faint trace of perfume? A man’s