The February Editor's Pick Story is by Richard Hill

Please feel free to email Richard at:

richard.hill537@ntlworld.com

THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF
by Richard Hill

The first time Thomas saw it, it was out of the corner of his eye. Over the head of the green angel on the roof came a sudden white blur, and he squinted in the dusk of the setting sun.

As he shivered and pulled his red scarf tighter around his throat with his free hand, he saw another movement at the window and the vague figure in overalls put a hand to its throat, and then it was gone. It was too dark to make out his face, and too dark to paint any more that night. Stiff and cold, Thomas climbed down the ladder.

Of all the buildings Thomas had ever laid paint upon—stations, houses, hotels, garages, buildings cheap and grand—none had been as hard and uncooperative as this one. He knew nothing about the building except that it had been empty and neglected since before the war.

Boarded up, but not empty, since I’ve just seen someone inside, he thought.

The angel was placed in a kneeling position at the gable-end of the roof. Thomas, leaning over from the cat ladder with his brush in hand, could barely see around the corner of the building. The old house was ajumble of corners, gables and chimneys, lost and piled one onto the other in the wind which never stopped tugging and pulling at the scaffolding.

The sun now fully set on a fine autumn day, Thomas was tired. He had stayed behind to finish the angel; a few dabs of gold to the spine of the open book it held, and he was done. He was a house painter, a good one, but he had never before done work like this. He had a clipboard chart of the colored angel to copy from, and the work was like a game, except for the wind, which always seemed to whirl around the building

The reality was that the house, left for so long in neglect, was hard to paint. “It doesn’t take kindly to the brush,” old Bill Edwards had said, and he was right.

The paints and ladders were stored in one of the stables and, as he pushed through the door, the bright light stung his eyes after the twilight outside and he felt the heat of Morrow’s little empire. The storekeeper was grinning and waving a teapot.

“You timed that well,” Morrow, his boss, told him. “How many sugars? You’re the last to finish again. What’s going on up there between you and the angel on the roof?”

Thomas sat down at the table and cradled the hot mug of tea in his stiff hands. Ignoring the question about the angel, he said, “I’m not the last painter tonight. There’s someone still clocking up the overtime in one of the attics.”

“You must be really tired,” Morrow said. He pulled up an old deckchair and eased himself into it. “All the lads went home long ago. Are you sure you saw somebody?”

“Perfectly sure.” Thomas put the sticky cup down on the table and wiped the palms of his hands on his overalls. “It was a young man with blue overalls on, like ours, so he was hardly likely to have been the butler. As far as I know he’s still at it now.” He slid down from the table and walked over to where his coat was hanging behind the door.

Morrow was a fat, benign man, and the frown which slid across his face looked exaggerated in its solemnity, like a child’s. “I’ll bet it’s that thieving little Tommy. He’s in trouble with the gaffer for pinching those old pictures. I’ll finish here and go and have a look. Whereabouts was he?”

Thomas had pulled on his coat and scarf and was standing at the open door. “I'm not really sure. You know what this place is like…all windows and corners. I’d say he is somewhere up by the clock tower. Don’t bother about it now, though. Have a word with him tomorrow. I’m off home. I’ll see you then.”

“Say goodnight to the angel for me,” Morrow said as Thomas stepped out into the dark.

*****

Thomas slept badly that night. He lodged at the top of an old house in the town, and the autumn wind, which banged and rattled at the doors and windows, blew into his dreams. He dreamt of clouds and dark seas and black stone screaming angels with living eyes. It was almost daylight when he woke. His mouth was stiff with sleep and the windows shone grey. The tired wind still tapped against the glass.

The day became clear and crisp. From his kitchen window, the sky, bright blue, seemed to have moved almost out of sight, its blueness stretched thin. Thomas ate his breakfast and forgot his dreams. He decided to cycle to the big house, since the day was fine and he would escape the packed bus and the crowds. Once he left the town, it was only a short ride to the main gate of the estate.

The house stood about a mile away from the tall iron gates at the end of a pitted, tree-lined driveway. As he cycled around its curve the roof of the house, with its high clock tower, seemed to duck and weave about the treetops. Thomas imagined the house in its prime, coaches and fine horses crunching up the gravel path instead of a puffing house-painter on a pushbike.

Thomas was so early that he had expected to be the first, arriving ahead of the firm’s old bus, in time for an early cup of tea with Morrow, but he saw another bicyclist a few yards ahead of him.

There was something familiar in the way the other man sat the bike. The movement of the man’s shoulders and the set of his head reminded Thomas of someone known to him, someone not seen for along time.

The sun, still low, flickered between the grey trunks of the trees, and its sharp light seemed to rush against the edge of Thomas’s vision. He felt tired and light-headed as the other cyclist turned, and the thought came to him that the man might be ill.

Suddenly, the other cyclist threw up his arm and his bike crashed to the ground. Everything was too bright, too incandescent to be seen clearly, and then the bus was on the man.

Looking back over his shoulder, Thomas saw the bus driver’s shocked face, his eyes as wide as his open mouth. The firm’s bus was roaring up behind him, with the shocked faces of his workmates pasted against its windows. The screech of its brakes sent Thomas swerving, throwing up his arms to protect himself. And then, just like the other cyclist, he crashed to the ground. He rolled away from the front wheel of the bus as it bounced over his bike, twisting and crushing it.

He lay, gasping, on the wet tarmac as the bus screamed to a stop. Thomas saw the brightness of the day fading into a blur, until the shouting of the bus driver and his passengers pulled him back into the world. It was Morrow who reached him first, leaning over him, asking if he was okay.

Morrow’s voice seemed to follow, too slowly, the movement of his lips, like a badly-synchronised film. “There you are,” he was saying, “I’ll bet you’re concussed. Saw a lot of it in the war. Nothing broken, that’s the main thing. Talk about lucky.” He put his arm around Thomas to try to lift him up.

Thomas tried to sit up, failed, and lay back, his head resting on his rolled-up coat. “The other cyclist,” he managed to say, “fell off his bike too. The man ahead of me—what happened to him?”

“Just what I thought: concussed.” Morrow was nodding over him. “There was no other cyclist. The bus driver ran into you, and no one else.”

Bolton, the site foreman, swung into view. He was a tall man whose voice never fell below a shout. Thomas couldn't lift his head, and found himself staring at Bolton’s thick heavy hands.

Bolton turned to Morrow. “Better get him to hospital—but he can’t claim off the firm. He fell off that bike in his own time. We’re not paying for it.”

Thomas heard himself laughing, a thin, far-off sound like the noise of the sea. Later at the hospital, he was given forms, an injection, and then sent home.

And afterwards, he spent a week in his room alone. It seemed as if he had never been alone before, at least alone with himself and not merely away from others. His head ached constantly, and he went to a doctor who gave him pills which did nothing for the headaches but made his dreams more vivid. He would wake, hot and cold at the same time.

He was not, at first, sure whether he was truly awake, and finally he found that if he spoke he was almost sure that he was not asleep. He sometimes spoke to himself in the street or the shop at the corner of the road when he bought his cigarettes.

His mind began to play games with him. He would sit in the evening and watch the room disappear as the darkness grew; first the small things, the print on newspapers, an ashtray, tables, chairs, and finally the walls, the floor, the room, the sky above the window…all would disappear.

“Only dark,” he would tell himself. “Everything’s still here.”

Somewhere, he knew, he had missed a step. It was not the fall from the bike. His mind made strange connections outside his control. He had never felt alone before because he had never thought so deeply. He knew he would never speak to people like he would now because he never really listened before and neither did they.

Finally, when he felt strong and free, he decided to go back to work. He set off toward the bus stop. It had been raining, and the traffic hissed and sizzled along the shiny road.

Thomas was almost at the bus stop when he saw him again, the other man’s face open with alarm; a hunched figure in a donkey-jacket, and then he had turned and with a half-run jumped onto a bus.

Thomas froze. He had thought that he would know who he was, but even from the other side of the road he seemed to be so familiar, so ordinary as to be anyone, and now he had gone. Thomas thought briefly, stupidly, of following him, but before the idea was properly formed, his own bus had arrived, and he had to run across the road and leap onto the platform.

No more of the house painting seemed to have been finished while Thomas had been away from the old building. Some of his workmates had gone and some new faces had appeared, but he was glad to be back.

The site foreman stepped into the yard to meet him. “All right, are we—clean bill of health? You’d better leave the high stuff for a bit. I’ll get Ollerhead to carry on with the roof.”

“No! I want to go back on the roof.” Thomas was surprised at the sound of his own voice. He knew, had expected, what Bolton would say but he was almost shocked by the sound of his own voice arguing, sounding thin and high.

He wanted to say more, but stopped, watching Bolton’s indecision cloud his face. “You’ve got a doctor’s note, have you? You’re all right for heights?”

Thomas smiled. “It’s only on the ground I feel funny. I’ll get started.” He turned to leave before Bolton could change his mind.

“Be careful,” Bolton said, “I don’t want any medical claims against the company.” 

*****

It was on the thirdday that Thomas realized that he was frightened. It was not the freezing physical fear he had known in certain terrible brief moments of his life, or the frightened anxiety which he had once had when he had been out of work for a long time. His fear was like an illness. It took its shape from the day.

It was with him in the morning, subsided during the middle of the day except for odd times, and grew worse at the end of the day. His head still ached, and the fear and the headache became overwhelming symptoms. He began to look for the elusive other workman. He found his attention wandering. He was constantly waiting for the strange man to reappear, that unknown yet familiar figure.

Late one afternoon, Thomas was alone in one of the rooms below the clock tower. It was a small grey room with one dirty window and an old stone sink. The rain, never far away, had returned, falling in great gusting sheets and forcing Thomas to give up painting for the day.He washed his brushes in the sink and then, as he stood washing his hands, he felt a movement behind him in the shadows of the empty room. He stood and listened to the rain whispering against the window and was mortally, terribly, afraid.

He turned around suddenly and stumbled out of the dark room into the day and across the squelching lawn. Morrow looked up, surprised, as he pushed open the door of the storeroom to let Thomas inside.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” Thomas announced. “I’m seeing someone. Someone who isn’t real.”

The bare light bulb above their heads gave Morrow’s bland face became a new mask of shadows, and he looked at Thomas with bright eyes. “I know who it is. A man fell off that clock tower, years ago, before the war. This young chap slipped and fell off the tower. He was dead when they got to him, smashed up.”

Thomas sat on a chair. “So it’s a ghost. I think I knew.”

Morrow hesitated, a look almost of embarrassment on his face. “I didn’t say that, although I’m not arguing with you. It’s odd, bloody odd.”

Thomas smiled, and felt the lips pull back from his teeth. “Things that go bump in the night, ghosties and ghoulies and all that. If it is a ghost then he’s only haunting me. No one else sees him, dothey?”

Morrow’s half-formed expression made Thomas’s sudden anger burn in his face. “Well, do they?”

Morrow was silent.

“I’ll catch him,” Thomas said.

“You can’t catch a ghost.”

*****

He had never before sought his workmates. Now he began to check until he knew everyone on the site, but he never saw the ghost. He would stop painting and peer down from the ladder, watching the activity below, but there was nothing, until…

It was a dull Friday afternoon. He’d eaten his lunch alone, some ham sandwiches and a flask of tea. The clouds, slow and bloated, seemed to rest against the clock tower of the house, making it tall and sinister, drawn up to the sky.

He had asked about the building. It had been built by some unknown merchant, to his own strange dream in the 1850s, and since then it had been a private house, a convalescent home, a school and, during the war, a research station. There still remained, dotted about, wooden signs, clumsy aerials, and pieces of ancient equipment. Now it was to be a museum, restored to the merchant’s dream. But no matter how full of people, Thomas felt it would always be empty.

Standing on the ground, Thomas saw the ghost that last time, high above him. The phantom was up on the roof, next to the angel; a shimmering figure leaning forward, its face obscured in shadow, staring down at Thomas.

Thomas shouted and began to run. It was as if all his days of searching burst in his chest. He reached the scaffolding, still shouting at the ghost to stop, to come down, his feet swishing through the dewy grass of the lawn and then crunching along the gravel of the driveway.

He could still see the figure above him, peering down. As Thomas climbed the shaking ladder to the roof, his head pounded and his throat felt dry.

When he finally reached the roof, the platform was empty, and the angel was alone.

Thomas stood, swaying in the wind which hummed in his ears as the clouds rolled overhead. Below he heard voices and the sound of running feet and saw, for the last time, the other workman.

Thomas leaned against the angel on the roof, pressed against the wet sticky paint. He saw, far below, a broken figure lying on the ground. One leg was so bent and twisted that its foot seemed to touch its head. It lay, still and disjointed as a fallen puppet, in a bright red island of blood.

Thomas felt his head squeeze tight. He saw the pink upturned faces of the men below; the trees, the glistening sky high above, and the apparition’s face, his head red and broken.

And then Thomas let go of the angel on the roof, pitched forward and fell, endlessly tumbling through the air, and he knew he would finally meet the ghost.

A widely published poet, Richard Hill has also written for radio, TV, the theatre and magazines, as well as playing in assorted bands in and around Liverpool for as long as he can remember. Richard has an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool where, until his early retirement due to ill health, he headed up their Editorial Office as well as teaching Creative Writing. Until his illness he had never written horror fiction, but since going over to the dark side of literature he has been published in a number of horror magazines, his favorite being The Horror Zine.