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It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him. - Aleister Crowley
When Nicholas D. Wolfwood crossed the threshold of Terra Incognita that bright October morning, two things happened simultaneously. The first was that the opening chords of The House of the Rising Sun reverberated through the shop speakers, the thrumming guitar making the old floorboards tremble as though alive, the glass prisms in the window chiming in some sympathetic counterpoint beyond human perception.
The second was that his ears popped.
Combined, these disparate observations made him aware of a sensation he called "the camera," which felt as though some hidden lens somewhere was both observing and recording his actions for later scrutiny by a vast and unseen audience. His therapist, however, had told him that this was simply a symptom of his tendency to dissociate, and he should stop and re-center himself rather than indulge the feeling. Which his why he paid no attention whatsoever as the camera panned hard left to the woman in the black suit, who addressed it directly.
MERYL: Picture if you will a small shop in a picturesque downtown, on a street that could be anywhere. Among the bits and bobs of mercantile magic you can find affordable spells for love and luck, fortune and infamy. Entering stage right is one Nicholas D. Wolfwood, a fellow peddler of high hopes for everyone but himself, here to purchase the tools of his trade. It's a scene that has been rehearsed countless times, but today, unbeknownst to him, is opening night for the big magic show. Sitting in the audience are you and me, the lucky front row ticket holders to the Twilight Zone.
"Hey, Milly!" Wolfwood had to raise his voice to be heard over the music, as the lead singer bewailed the state of his blue jeans and his life. "You got that order ready for me?"
Terra Incognita been run for time out of mind by one Milly Thompson, an old school friend of Wolfwood's, who at first sight seemed about as mystical (and sharp) as a four-slot toaster, but whose gregarious nature and surprisingly accurate insight had made her as much a fixture of old main street as the shop itself. Like most of the businesses on that block, Milly's occupied a space in what had once been a posh residence in an age of corsets and no income tax. But over the decades the downtown townhouses had been sliced up into shops and apartments, sometimes with no concern for the historical building boundaries. This was, of course, only a problem for the living residents.
Minding the shop as a favor for Milly one dull gray February afternoon, Wolfwood had watched in mute astonishment as a woman in a pale green dress manifested beside the fireplace and walked through a bricked-up doorway into the antique shop next door. Wolfwood had stared at where she had been for a full thirty seconds, then locked up with shaking hands and spent the rest of the day drinking at the bar across the street. He'd refused to fill in for Milly since.
But apparently she had found some other sucker for that, as Wolfwood stepped into the main showroom of the shop, once the best parlor, and saw that someone besides Milly was at the register. At least, the ass poking out from behind the counter was not Milly's. It was too scrawny, for one thing.
"Sorry, sorry," said the presumed owner of the ass, rustling under the counter amid the boxes and tissue paper. "I don't think there's anything here about an order--" He pulled himself upright like a free diver surfacing, a shock of golden hair lighting up the room like the halo of an electric Christmas tree angel. He wore an old punk-show t-shirt held together with safety pins and haphazard stitches, and his left arm was a confusing swirl of tattooed colors and lines. His blue eyes, guileless and innocent, shone brighter than the opalite glass nuggets that Milly kept by the register to repel negativity and credulous shoppers.
"I don't suppose you've got a receipt?" He flipped through a wrinkled legal pad, and shook his spiky head in dismay. He was the cutest thing Wolfwood had seen this side of a basket of ribboned kittens, and Wolfwood was immediately, and inexplicably, annoyed. No doubt Milly had roped in one of her endless cousins to cover things for her. How Milly was allowed to have a cousin this adorable was yet another mystery that Wolfwood had no inclination to solve. His parking meter was running.
"Don't bother," Wolfwood sighed, and started pulling novena from the shelf, tucking them into the crook of his arm. "It's a standing order, she probably didn't write it down."
"Oh, phew," he said, and cleared away a mess of metaphysical newsletters and art show flyers to give Wolfwood a place to put down the candles. "Sorry, first day."
"No kidding?" Wolfwood didn't bother to meet his eyes as he counted the candles, and went back for three more green ones. "I had no idea."
"I'm Vash," he said, from behind Wolfwood's back.
"And I'm short a Van-Van and two Fast Luck," Wolfwood said, turning away from the shelf and adding, pointedly, "She usually keeps the extras in the back."
The new hire--Vash--was staring at Wolfwood in a thoughtful kind of way that Wolfwood did not care for at all. People who looked at him like that were liable to ask him for his number, and there followed all kinds of annoyances that he had neatly excised from his life years ago. But all Vash said, after a somewhat lengthy pause, was, "I'm not sure we even have one van."
Wolfwood allowed himself an unapologetic eyeroll. "I'll get it," he said, and added over his shoulder as he walked through the curtain at the back of the shop, "Don't worry, I'm not gonna steal anything."
Vash's expression shifted, a knowing stillness that landed lightly on his eyes before vanishing. "No," he said, in the empty seconds that Wolfwood was in the back room, "You wouldn't."
The playlist switched from the Animals to Stevie Nicks crooning gently about a heroine in a dime-store novel, elevating her name to that of a goddess.
When Wolfwood re-emerged from the storeroom, arms full of candles, Vash was smiling a plaster-saint smile that concealed him like a reliquary. "Oh, good," he said, whipping a receipt pad out of his back pocket. "You found them."
Wolfwood struggled to conceal his annoyance. It was difficult, as there was something incredibly annoying about this Vash guy, and his smug indifference to his job. Maybe Milly wasn't paying him, and so he was just phoning it in... but that didn't sound like Milly at all. And Vash was rolling each glass jar candle up in a sheet of brown paper with the deftness of an old hand. His smile was still there, benign and impenetrable. Wolfwood had the sudden thought that maybe Vash wasn't going to ask him for his phone number, and somehow that was the most annoying thing of all.
"Lot of candles for one fellah," Vash said, finishing up the white ones, and moving to the red. "You must have a lot of prayers saved up."
For some reason Wolfwood didn't like meeting those bright blue eyes, and when they were closed under his feathery gold lashes, he didn't like that, either. So he focused his attention on Vash's tattoo. He only had the one sleeve, and it was a swirl of bright wings and unblinking eyes and writhing human forms: a Sistine Chapel ceiling as painted by H.R. Giger. The twisting plumes wound down to his very fingertips, in armor-like arabesques.
"I'm just an intercessor," Wolfwood said, shuffling and re-shuffling the stack of business cards for Milly's regular tarot reader. He glanced back at Vash's knuckles, and sucked in a sharp breath that made his teeth ache. The tattooed wings cradling each of Vash's knuckles had drawn back, and now four iridescent eyes stared back at Wolfwood: one almost human, one the thirsty void of a bird's eye, one cat-eye, predatory, and another the melting jewel of some large ungulate. They were still made of ink and skin, and yet they swiveled and stared at Wolfwood with all the subtle motion of something alive, intent, ever-watchful. Pain brought Wolfwood back into himself as he sliced his thumb on one of the business cards. He had blinked against the horror, reflexively, and in an instant, the eyes were concealed again.
"An intercessor?" Vash was asking, blithely unaware of Wolfwood's fingers pressed to bloodless white on the countertop, his heart slamming wildly against his ribs. "You don't look like a Priest."
"I. uh." Wolfwood looked at Vash, and then away from Vash, and finally settled on the large mercury-glass mirror above the old fireplace. He saw himself there, in his dusty motorcycle blacks and scruffy coal-scuttle hair. His face was drawn tight, wan. Scared. He took a deep breath and the color crept back into his complexion. "More of a minister."
He was just tired. That was all. Too many late nights, too much time alone... I like being alone, right.
"Between you and me, you don't look much like one of those, either," Vash said, with a wink.
As he continued to wrap up the candles, Vash's tattoos stayed put, and strength gradually returned to Wolfwood's voice.
"I'm a builder, actually. Outdoor wood stuff. Sheds, gazebos, things like that. Sometimes a little repair work on one of the churches or covered bridges in town. This woo-woo stuff happened by chance." Wolfwood slowly tapped a cigarette out of the pack in his back pocket. "One winter when work was slow, I made a shed, and just to show off the things I could do I made it look like a church. Steeple and all. Put it up in my yard. Next thing I know Milly's asking me if I can use it to set lights for her customers. Then she says I should just do it for them directly. Now look at me." Wolfwood made a gesture to the candle-covered countertop. "Sole minister and caretaker of the Little December Spiritualist Chapel."
Vash had finished wrapping the candles, and began to pack them into a cardboard box that still smelled like pennyroyal and palo santo. "They do say the Lord works in mysterious ways."
"I don't know about that, but I sure am the biggest fire hazard in the county." Wolfwood lit his cigarette off the Better Business candle Milly always kept going on the counter. If she'd been there, she never would have let him smoke inside, but what she didn't know wouldn't hurt him. And it was pretty easily concealed by the odor of her patented "etheric energy room-clearing spray," whatever the hell that was supposed to be.
"So none of these candles are actually for you, huh?"
"Nope," Wolfwood said, with the kind of self-effacing pride familiar to ascetics and soldiers. He took a long drag from his cigarette, its gleaming ember safer by far than the spark of wishes embedded in wax, than hope and dreams. "You get too much in the habit of asking for things, you forget how to take them for yourself. It's easier to pray and feel like you've done something than to just put in the work."
He did not say, if I lit one candle I would have to light a thousand. He did not admit that his own desires, if allowed air, would make up a conflagration that would swallow him up in longing.
"Or maybe it's easier not to want anything, so you don't get disappointed when it doesn't come." Vash, with cherubic innocence, pretended not to notice as Wolfwood coughed on his smoke. As though to divert things back to more conversational topics, he added, "Do they work? The candles."
Wolfwood shrugged. "Sometimes. Often enough. If it's for somebody else."
"But not for you?"
"Nah." Oh, he had tried, in early days. He remembered the fast luck candle that wouldn't stay lit, the money-come-to-me that inexplicably exploded, and the less said about the love one, the better. Either the universe wanted Wolfwood to consider more carefully what he asked for, or it had no intentions of giving it to him. Whatever it was, he'd gotten the message. None of the name-papers under the dozens of candles in the Little Chapel said Nicholas D Wolfwood.
"It's better to keep work life and private life separate, anyway."
"C'mon, you must want something. I'll throw in a candle for it, on the house."
Wolfwood tilted his cigarette upwards in his lips, ember flaring as he laughed. "If I figure out what to wish for I'll let you know."
"Well, be sure when you do. A wish made three times is a wish that can't be taken back, after all."
Big talk from a guy that doesn't even know what van-van is, Wolfwood thought, but tossed a lazy wave back at Vash as he backed out of the front door, box under his arm, shop bells jangling. "I'll keep that in mind."
In Wolfwood's opinion, three a.m. was the worst. Midnight always got the bad rap, but he felt there was some measure of glamour and excitement to midnight. Cinderella's party was still in full swing at midnight. But three, and its bastard sibling four, was nothing but a queasy interlude, and waking up between them was like a lamb waking up in a wolves' den, with everything in nature telling it that it had no business being there, and would surely pay for its carelessness.
It was 3:33 when Wolfwood finally gave up and got out of bed. Not even numerology could comfort him at this hour. Yawning, he pulled on some sweats and shuffled into the kitchen to make a thermos of coffee. He might as well check the lights in the church.
Wolfwood had built it with all the trimmings, challenging himself to make it as well-constructed as anything ten times the size. Leftover lumber and salvaged stained-glass from his other jobs had provided most of the materials, and it was outfitted with a tiny altar and pews big enough for one person each, just for fun. The aisle was amply-sized by comparison, as it was intended for Angelina, Wolfwood's two-wheeled pride and joy. However, once the chapel had taken off, he had been obliged to make another, less ecclesiastical shed for his motorcycle.
Wolfwood knew about all these practical, corporeal, boring things, and yet unlocking the door of the tiny chapel at night, especially during Hamlet's hour of yawning churchyards, felt as though he was disturbing something hushed and grave. Each candle was a congregant in prayer, arrested by some desperate reverie. It was not alarming, like the green woman in Milly's shop had been. But it was far more aware of him than the ghost had been.
"Evening, everyone," he said, before shutting the door behind him. Cold air followed him in, along with a scatter of frosted oak and maple leaves. The candles bowed in a rippling wave, then righted again. It was as warm as breath inside.
He had trimmed the lights before bed, tending to them like a gardener over his roses. The candles were sleepy in their waxy beds (except for Miss Elen's Follow Me Boy, that thing always went like a volcano, phew). But he'd put off unpacking the candle order for later, and it was later now.
The candles glowed in the glass, the wind nudged against the windowpanes, as Wolfwood drank his coffee and sorted the candles into milk cartons by purpose. These for luck, these for protection. Success and health. Love and peace. He looked at them all, with their brightly colored labels, and could not find one to represent anything he wanted. He was lucky enough. He could pay his bills. His health was sound, even if he should lay off the smokes. He had no desire to hex or harm anyone. As for love, it was nothing but trouble. He had good friends. Asking for more would just be greedy. Easy enough to believe that a single mom working minimum wage deserved to win the lottery so she could get her son's teeth fixed, or for good health to live out her years in comfort, or a loving helpmate to share the labor and make her feel beautiful. Every prayer that landed in Wolfwood's mailbox or email was a worthy one, or at the very least, deeply desired. His own? Not so much.
He tossed the empty box down on the floor, and something inside went clunk.
The box had been empty. He was pretty sure of that. But he looked inside anyway, where one lone, brown-paper wrapped candle remained. Wolfwood didn't think he was missing any from his order, but he rolled the novena out of its paper and into his palm. The label was not one of Milly's. It was weathered parchment, with a scrolling border. Wolfwood traced his thumb over the etched plumes and thought of tattoo lines. In their frame, a winged figure hovered with one arm outstretched in benediction, and the legend below read: Guardian Angel.
Milly must be picking up stock from some local crafter, he thought. They really went all out on the olde timey wychecraftee look sometimes. And then he got a good look at the angel on the label, and an uncomfortable prickle spider-walked down the back of his neck.
He knew that face. It didn't matter that his hair was longer or one wing covered his tattooed left arm. It was Vash. The weird guy from the shop, there on the label, without a doubt. There was even the tiniest pinprick of a dot under one eye, for a mole.
Which made the candle even more obviously a plant, right? Vash must have made this one and slipped it into Wolfwood's box. Maybe he was a competing vendor. Maybe he was hoping Wolfwood would switch suppliers. God, there were dozens of likely scenarios, and every one of them more mundane than the last.
The spider of unease skittered its anxious legs down Wolfwood's spine.
Whichever way he tilted the candle, the angel on the label seemed to shift slightly. At the edges of his sight, the pinions shivered, the clouds billowed. With effort, Wolfwood looked away. He was thoroughly creeped out, and doing his best to not admit it. So he had gotten a nice little freebie. He'd find a use for it. He skimmed his milk-crates to find one to put the candle in, and realized there wasn't one. These were all other people's wishes.
A vast gulf of loneliness opened up at Wolfwood's feet. He heard Vash's voice as clearly as though he stood beside him, "Here among these deferred prayers, these orphan dreams you take in and care for, is there not one of your own?"
Wolfwood did not allow himself to think twice. He put the candle down on the altar, right in the middle in a place he left empty for emergency work. The gesture with his lighter, snap-click-fizz, was deft with long practice. "This," he said. "I want this."
Wolfwood lit the candle.
And Heaven unfolded itself in the center of the breathless space.
An angel hung there, his hair a riot of gold down his shoulders. He was clad in light that clung to his perfect form like rain-drenched silk, billowing in sea-spume radiance around his slowly beating wings. Though the wind was all around him, not one flame so much as trembled upon its wick. His loving, beatific smile fell lightly upon Wolfwood's face, like snow, and melted away every fear.
"It's about damn time," Vash said.
Laughing, Wolfwood flung open his arms, and they came together like a falling star to the sea.
The angel's kiss seared Wolfwood's open mouth with holy fire, poured molten gold on his tongue, and then swept over him with a honey-sweet warmth to the soles of his feet. Once his lips were so blessed, Vash moved on to his throat, his shoulder, and the soft hollow behind his jaw. Wolfwood made a faint noise of disbelief and pleasure.
"Why? Why now?"
"Would you believe I've been here all this time?" Vash's tattooed fingertips traced cool as water over Wolfwood's cheek. "Waiting for you to look for me. To call on me. But you would never ask for me." His pout was very much that of the young man in the shop, and yet still that of an angel. "I had to take matters into my own hands."
Wolfwood held the angel's perfect face in his profane hands. "I'm asking now." Wolfwood slipped his hands into the cool silk of the angel's hair, felt the rustling, shivering wings beyond, and gave himself up to the blue flame of his gaze. Wanting was so delicious. Longing filled his body with an ache and a tension he had long deprived himself. He had resisted the weight of wanting anything for so long that his limbs shook with it. It was so heavy. It was so warm. He asked, and Vash answered him, over and over again.
There was no agonizing moment of uncertainty or fear that had always accompanied such moments for Wolfwood in the past. The ordeal of having to explain himself, to await judgment. He was loved, body and soul, with a clear-eyed affection that encompassed flaws and failures alike, but deemed them nothing more than motes of dust in the overwhelming light that was Wolfwood's heart. He felt certain he had been loved long since, from his earliest childhood or even farther back, perhaps from some lost and forgotten lifetime.
Vash's mouth and hands knew him, and Wolfwood called out the name of his angel over and over again.
Wolfwood woke to the sound of his phone ringing. By the time he had unstuck his face from the pew and organized his assorted limbs to their correct locations, it had gone to voicemail. He yawned, and tried to pop his spine back into joint. Mid-morning sunlight lay in rainbow stripes across the floor. His phone was in the pocket of his sweatpants, which were for some reason flung over the opposite pew. He pulled them back on and tapped the message button with his nose.
Milly's voice filled the room like the scent of daisies. "Gooood morning, Father Nicholas! Just wanted to say sorry if you tried to pick up your order yesterday! I had to close the shop, Miss Neko ate some of Meryl's yarn again, so we spent the whole morning at the vet. She's fine, of course! Anyway, I've got the candle order for the chapel whenever you want to come by and pick it up! Byee!"
The message cut off with a beep, and Wolfwood, staring blankly into some distance beyond a blazing row of Fiery Wall of Protection candles, fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. On the altar, the Guardian Angel candle sat, no longer lit, its pearly white wax used down about a third of the jar. It had not gone out, but been neatly extinguished, and the events of the night before ambled out of dreams into reality and made themselves right at home.
A wish made three times is a wish you can't take back.
Wolfwood smiled, and reached for his lighter.
Fade out on Nicholas D Wolfwood, a man learning--not too late this time--that asking for what you want is the most direct means of getting it. A blank ticket to the future paid in full, with one notable station change in the Twilight Zone.
Meryl's voice rose through the silence, folding around the scene like a curtain and drawing the listeners away. When she had finished, the audience clustered around the shop counter broke into uneven applause. Milly's was enthusiastic, the cat was incapable of it, and Vash and Wolfwood landed somewhere in-between.
Meryl let her arms fall to her sides, her smile jittery but pleased. "Anyway, that's my pitch for the station's live Halloween bumpers. But we'll be doing them for the different show hosts, of course. What do you think?"
"I think it's super!" Milly cheered, her eager clapping like wind-chimes.
Vash shook away the distant, dreamy expression he'd been wearing for the past ten minutes, lost in some pleasant reverie of his own. "Sorry, I zoned out for a bit there. What'd I miss?"
"All right, all right," Wolfwood drawled, pretending to be bored but now desperate to shift the subject away from Vash's daydream--and his own. "But if that's my episode, what would Spikey's be over here?"
"Me?" Vash blinked. "But I thought that was my--"
"He's an old west gunslinger," Milly proposed, right over Vash's protests.
Meryl caught on immediately. "But it's not Earth!"
"It's an alien planet!"
"And he's the only original survivor of the original crew!"
"Okay okay," Wolfwood cut in, immediately sorry he'd asked. "But more importantly," Wolfwood turned to Meryl to ask her the real burning question he'd had on his mind the entire time. " .... are you wearing my suit?"
~o~