Timelike directions

 The house at Westrill, which went by different names depending on the direction you approached it from, was built atop a small rise.  Looking west towards it now, as the name suggested, it appeared to be ancient: it was black-beamed and white-plastered and, if it were a cottage, could easily be believed to have been built six or seven hundred years ago.  As it was it seemed to have two stories and a couple of outbuildings and so maybe had been built only two or three years earlier.  Smoke rose from all of its eight chimneys, which clustered together in the middle of the roof, creating a tiny grey-white cloud above the house.

Around it, daffodils were springing up from the grass of the rise, and the tiny river, the rill, that contributed to the house's name was running in full spate by my feet.  There was a distant lowing as cattle grazed nearby, but I couldn't see any of them and it was entirely possible that I was hearing them along the time-axis and they wouldn't be here for a few hours yet.

Justin smiled at me and I bit back my frustration.

"Cows?" he asked.  I nodded.

Justin is one of the Timeless Ones.  They have a proper name that matches with Schehdim and Seraphim but I'd forgotten it again.  It's not like I need to refer to his kind on a regular basis anyway, unlike the others.  He and his kind seem to have an effortless control over time; they can move around in it to suit themselves.  I haven't figured out yet what kind of changes they can effect but Justin seems interested in showing me.  There's something about a point-of-reference that is crucial: you can change things after the point-of-reference because that's the 'future' and you can't change the 'past' but after you cover that he starts getting mathematical and my head starts to swim.

"I can hear them, but not see them," I said.

"Point to them."

"I just said I can't see them!"  I pointed anyway in the direction the lowing seemed to be coming from.  He nodded.

"About a year away," he said.  He vanished for a moment and I realised, too late, that he must have walked off in a timelike direction for a better look.  He reappeared a moment later looking sweaty so I guessed that it must have been a fair distance there and back.  It was nice of him, I supposed, to put the gap in between his disappearance and reappearance so I knew what he'd done; he could just have seemed to have the knowledge already.  He was laughing now.  "You should definitely come back here in a year's time," he said.  "It's hilarious."

"Can't I go there now?" I asked, trying to see where he might have gone.  Looking timewards feels very weird to me, like trying to see the back of your own eyeball.  Sometimes it hurts, too.

"Only if I guided you," said Justin.  "You're getting better, but that's a long way to go by yourself.  At the moment.  But... let's come back in six months, you should be able to walk the other six by yourself then."

"Thanks," I muttered, feeling slightly useless.

"But anyway," he said, sitting down and let the water run over his hand.  "Tell me about the angels who want you dead."

Short fat Romeo

He was a short, fat Romeo, stood outside a tenement block whose residents were once all on welfare, shouting up at a rusted iron balcony. I couldn't understand what he was saying; the echoes on the estate distorted his whiny little voice, and the roar of traffic in the distance was still trying to lull me to sleep. I suspected he was calling out a name, trying to summon a friend, or at the very least an acquaintance, to hang around with him until it was dark enough to sneak back into his mother's flat and hope she was too drunk to care. There was no response from the balcony, not even a response from the tenements. I wondered briefly if perhaps he was calling for someone who'd lived there before everyone died, and then wondered for longer why I cared.
When did everyone die, and why hadn't I remembered that before? The thought stuck in my head like a soldier ant stuck in amber, angry and pulsing, trying to get free. Everyone had died, there'd been a chemical leak from the plant a half-mile away. A great invisible cloud of gas had gone up, floated along a little way, and then come down again as it reacted with water in the atmosphere. It had descended like a heavy wet sponge and suffocated the life out of everyone in the building.
Short fat Romeo was shouting again, longer sentences this time, but still too distorted to understand. I opened my eyes at last, looking up at a cracked ceiling. Cockroaches skittered across it, and for a moment I was confused, and then I remembered that I was lying on the ceiling and the cockroaches were skittering on the floor. My hand, the one that still worked and wasn't black and swollen, scrabbled at my chest and found the restraining strap. It released it, and I fell to the floor, squashing a cockroach or two, but more of them survived. Another rib cracked.
Short fat Romeo was shouting louder now, his voice stronger, and I started at last to recognise the words. Immediately I wished I hadn't; he was shouting in Enochian, the language of the angels, and I understood that he was beseeching Metatron.
It wasn't Metatron who answered, there's been no direct route to the angels from this part of London in over fifty years, but something did; something caused a cloud like a stink of swamp gas to lift from the ground and let oxygen bleed back in. Something prowled the rooms and corridors of that tenement, hunting for the preserved and corrupted bodies left there, and something breathed into them; a fiery, sparkling breath that lit strange lights behind their eyes (those that still had eyes) and stood them upright and bade them walk once more.
I clutched at my ribs with my good hand, and pulled myself up to my feet and made myself run. This was no place for the living now if the dead were returning. Behind me, short fat Romeo finished his shouting, unaware that he'd been heard.