Molly Molloy & the Angel of Death, page 1
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MOLLY MOLLOY AND THE ANGEL OF DEATH
MARIA VALE
Copyright © 2023 by Maria Vale.
All rights reserved.
Names: Vale, Maria, author
Title: Molly Molloy & the Angel of Death
Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction, American| Speculative fiction |GSAFD: Love stories.| Occult fiction.
Cover design and illustration
by Victoria Heath Silk
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are manipulated to suit the author’s imagination.
For M, H & G
Life is the day to day living of it.
With you.
CONTENT WARNING
This is a love story of two characters who fall in love and have a life but because Death is immortal and Molly is not, it is not a romance.
Also note that it includes mention of attempted assault, suicide and child intensive care.
CONTENTS
I. The Book of Admonishments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
II. The Book of Molly
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Maria Vale
PART I
THE BOOK OF ADMONISHMENTS
CHAPTER 1
Neil Steinhauer occasionally thought about Janine. She’d been very sweet and liked him, possibly loved him. Well, probably not loved, but she would have married him, if he’d asked. He hadn’t asked because he thought he could get someone prettier. Someone who showed better at office parties and reunions.
It hadn’t happened that way and now in his sixties, Steinhauer was ten years past giving up. The skin of his hands had thickened and dried and he had one (borrowed) kidney and nine toes. Everyone who saw him at the Donut Hole in Harrow watched disapprovingly when he bought three jelly-filled.
Then he shuffled painfully past the censorious line waiting for Chillattas and died.
At which point Neil Steinhauer’s part in the salvation of the world was done and taken up by a raspberry jelly-filled that Death took from Mr. Steinhauer’s bag, because he was always hungry and because he knew any food in the immediate vicinity of the First World dead would be discarded.
Death’s next appointments were in places that are typically called war-torn, as though war had only ripped them once, rather than shredding them time and time again like a Weedwhacker through bluegrass. So when Death entered the room in Mount Sinai, he pulled on the elbow-length rubber gloves he got by the gross from a restaurant supply shop on the Bowery and checked the first mirror he’d seen since eating Mr. Steinhauer’s donut. There was powdered sugar on the lapel of his greatcoat. He shoved his list into one big outer pocket and flicked at the pale dusting.
Between the pocketing and the flicking, he rather lost track.
In the room, an ancient woman lay in her bed, her eyes closed, her mouth open. Although she was covered by a gown and sheet, Death knew that underneath, her body had shriveled and bruised around the places where tubes had been pushed in to extract some fluids and to insert others.
He missed the days when the whole family gathered at home and the old people would give away the teapot to this one and the cow to that one and when he touched them, the old men and older women would smile at him, because they knew that he wasn’t a problem to be solved by intubation.
At least this one wasn’t alone. There was a young woman next to her wolfing something down. Her head was bent low over the box, her lips smeared bright orange.
Chicken wings, by the looks of it.
Slow down, Death thought, patting her absently on the back.
She coughed once, then wiped her mouth on a stained napkin.
After looking at him for a disconcertingly long moment during which Death dusted his lapel again, she said, “You’re here for my grandmother?”
Death craned his neck around to see who she was talking to.
“You. I’m talking to you.”
“Me?” he said, alarm making his voice sound squeaky.
“You’ve come for my grandmother, right?”
Death looked toward the shriveled pile of blankets and nodded dumbly.
“Just a minute. I really gotta wash my hands,” she said, wiggling her fingers in the air in between them.
“What?”
“The doctor said you could be coming at any time. But they’ve been saying that for years, so I wasn’t quite sure I believed him. Can you give me a minute?”
“Yes?” Death squeaked again, then cleared his throat.
The girl headed to the sink and washed her face and hands in the pink antibacterial soap. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Mind passing me a couple of paper towels?”
“Thanks,” she said after he had. Then she held out the Styrofoam container filled with bright orange wings. “Want some? They’re good but I’m kind of done.”
Death had been called the Devourer of Worlds but that didn’t mean he was above a meaty chicken wing, so he took one.
“Sorry,” the girl said, pouring iced water from the mustard-yellow pitcher into a plastic glass, while Death flapped his hands in front of him, desperately gulping air that was doing nothing to cool his seared tongue. “I suppose I should have told you they’re Atomic.”
While he flapped and gulped, the girl leaned over her unconscious grandmother as though meaning to say something but an awkward moment later seemed to think better of it.
“I guess we’re ready,” she said, holding her grandmother’s limp hand and looking at him expectantly.
Using the gloved hand that wasn’t stained orange by Atomic sauce, Death pushed his fingers to the old woman’s sunken abdomen just at her omphalos, the spot that whatever other tragedy hit in the womb, was always there. It was the place that tied the baby to its mother and through her to the whole long disastrous chain of humanity. It was the doorway of the soul. The entrance and the exit. The beginning and the end.
Most of the time the souls in failing bodies came easily, recognizing an escape from pain, from fear, from despair, or simply from having been around too long.
This one did not. He had to push in deeper, digging around until he found the stubborn old woman. He pulled hard, but she held on even harder. He buttressed one thick-soled black boot against the side rail and pulled with both hands.
Death felt more than a little embarrassed at making a muddle of things in front of his first audience ever in the history of this whole sordid adventure. To speed things up, he took out the sharp shard of obsidian he kept in his outer pocket and drew a line across the old woman’s forehead. It didn’t pierce the skin, but her soul zipped up like a roller blind in an old cartoon.
Then with one more mighty tug, a length of velvety black emerged from the weakened body accompanied by a final breath.
“Do you always have trouble like that?” the young woman asked.
“N-no. Not usually,” he said. He held the old woman’s Rag high and swirled it expertly into his curved palm. Opening the oversized gray greatcoat that he’d been wearing ever since his well-worn cassock had gotten caught on a bayonet at Passchendaele, he slipped grandma’s soul into a red flannel pocket, one of the multitude of tiny patches he’d sewn and resewn over the years.
“So,” she said, “we done here?”
“I guess?” he said.
“Alrighty, then.”
Then the young woman started to squeeze past him toward the door. He touched the warmth of her and took in the faint mossy scent beneath the smell of antibacterial soap and Betadine and habanero.
It made him feel uncomfortable and like he ought to say something to pretend he wasn’t. “Until next time?” he offered.
She paused for a moment, one eyebrow slightly raised.
“You know what? Don’t rush.”
Yuh-oh, he thought. This is going to be trouble.
CHAPTER 2
As soon as he got home, Death cleared out his overstuffed mailbox and headed upstairs to his apartment. Once there, he dropped the mail on his kitchen table and emptied his big outer pockets into the upside-down lime-green Cake Taker that sat on top of the chest he’d been schlepping around since the Second Babylonian Captivity.
Gently laying his coat across the futon, he retrieved the orange plastic laundry basket from the defunct fireplace. He’d fitted the basket with a liner sewed from a flannel blanket, so that even if it was full, none of the souls would slip through the cutouts that served as handles.
He carefully unloaded each of the little inner pockets of his coat, pausing for a moment with the struggling Rag he had collected with such difficulty at Mt. Sinai, before dropping it among all the other writhing splotches of charcoal and black.
As soon as he was done, the basket disappeared with a hushed whoosh.
Death retrieved a new box of Peanut Butter Crunch from a shelf filled with them and pulling either side of the waxy bag, opened it with no tears, an act that always gave him inordinate satisfaction.
Hunched over his large bowl, he looked through the pile of letters and free magazines. He set aside an Intimate Male catalog addressed to Resident for later and started reading the cards addressed to Dear Friend or Valued Neighbor. Their congenial concern for his well-being always made him feel appreciated, which was no small thing in his line of work.
He didn’t bother to look when his laundry basket—empty now—fell back to the floor with a loud thunk.
Death’d been doing this job for 197,856 years, ever since that woman in that cave held her babies close and thought, I am going to die. Not in the specific, I am being eaten by this larger, hungrier creature or I am sinking into this smelly, inescapable bog, but in the more existential, I am alive now and I will not always be and I am afraid.
At that moment, the stinking, lice-ridden, combative, sex-mad, perpetually decaying, fearful animals became human and, it had been decided, they needed a psychopomp, someone to guide them through the transition from the existence they were now aware they had.
That someone would have to live among the stinking, lice-ridden, combative, sex-mad, perpetually decaying, fearful humans. There was a lot of nervous shuffling among the Custodes Rectorum, the Keepers of Righteousness. Quick sidelong glances were followed by the holding of hands smelling faintly of frankincense to delicate upturned noses. Then someone—Death always suspected it was that jerk Salaphiel—called out, “How about Azrael?”
A murmur swept through the Custodes. They all agreed it made sense: Azrael had failed Righteousness four times, was always the last chosen for any game of Obedience, a complete botch-up at Venerating (Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Sanctus, Sanctus) and sang all the time even though he couldn’t carry a tune.
More to the point, it would keep him busy, keep him out of trouble because, well, they all remembered what happened last time.
Plus nobody else wanted the job.
Azrael had some reservations but then he’d looked at the prissy Hosanna singers to the right of him and the prissy Hosanna singers to the left at which point he said, “Oh, what the hey.”
A sigh of relief blew across the heavens like a jasmine-scented wind on an evening in Sorrento.
We’ll visit, they’d promised, patting him wanly on the back.
“Don’t bother,” he’d responded and leaned backward, letting himself fall through the ether. When he landed, he was no longer Azrael. He was Death, the Gray Walker, the Pale Rider, the Dark Companion and many other descriptive turns of phrase, though in fact the only time any human had seen him was at the exact millisecond they snuffed it, which went some way toward explaining the diversity of opinion as to his appearance.
Death wiped out his bowl and set it on the grooved, enameled drainboard.
One thing was sure: that girl had seen him, not only seen him, but recognized him, talked to him. Bossed him around. Offered him a chicken wing then poured him a glass of water. Watched him struggle.
Then she’d made it clear that she didn’t want to see him any more than he wanted to see her.
To distract himself, Death sat on his futon with the Intimate Male catalog in one hand and his obsidian blade in the other.
He’d started out like every other Custodes, with—“Eyes to Gaze, Lips to Praise, Hands to Raise and a Nose to Smell Out Corruption”—but then he’d started making changes. At first, he’d lengthened his nose and enlarged his eyes, explaining to anyone who asked that it was necessary because the stench was strong and the light was weak.
Other changes, he hid. He didn’t want to have to explain, as he knew he would, that his body looked so bland, so empty by comparison to the variety of muscle, fat, color, hair, scars, moles, bone and all the other baroque embellishments of mortality.
Here, for example. He looked at the picture on the cover of the Intimate Male Big Blowout Sale catalog. This man walked through the surf wearing nothing but white beach pants that were on sale for $35. There was so much complexity: the graceful broad ridge at the top of his chest. Two big bulgy bits with teeny-tiny, dark bulgy bits on top. Like muffin tops with a chocolate chip plunked down in the middle of each. A series of lumps divided down the middle that looked like a big cicada shell. Dark hair scattered all over.
He'd been working on ribs for the better part of a century. So far, they were just a few shallow runnels, palpable, but not visible. He pulled up his T-shirt and felt for them. Then he cut through the celestial material of his body with his obsidian blade. Even as he watched, the furrow began to close.
Just as he started to cut into the second runnel, he smelled frankincense and a silvery swirl appeared at the foot of his futon. “RAGPICKER!” intoned a voice.
Death quickly pulled his duvet up to his chin. “’Lo, Jophiel. Don’t suppose this could wait until later?”
“Later?” Jophiel repeated, before spouting one of the aphorisms the Custodes used to try to make sense of any word having to do with time. “We are when nothing was?”
“Nevermind.”
Like all Custodes, Jophiel was timeless, existing then and now and at all points in-between. It made Death queasy keeping track of all those simultaneous existences melding together into a shimmering worm of his iterations: Jophiel as he first arrived and every Jophiel since with the Jophiel of now at their head. And they all talked at the same time. The copy at the very end of the worm would continue to shout RAGPICKER! in an endless loop until Jophiel went back Up.
He’d been the same when he’d first become Death. At the time, humans were still very sparse on the ground, so there was something comforting about the constant companionship of his past selves.
Then humans started settling and grouping together and reproducing at an alarming rate. The settling and grouping was followed quickly by plagues and wars and other large slaughtering events and Death had begun to find it confusing, always bumping into his earlier selves still spelunking around in the empty omphaloi of the already dead.
So he’d gone native, as Abdiel said with disgust, existing in one moment before moving on to another. Just him. Like a human. Except for the part about never dying.
Death hadn’t told Abdiel about the other thing. About how he’d learned to make any particular moment stretch out infinitely. There had been a time when humanity pirouetted on the edge of extinction. With only 2,000 souls, Abdiel worried that Death wasn’t being kept busy and signed him up for Group which was really just more Righteousness with the addition of Choir.
