The inner cave

The smell of flowers lured me westwards.  Well, I thought it was westwards, based on where the sun was in the sky, but I’d long since learned that directions in the desert were never quite as easy as that.  I was sure I’d spent days walking in enormous circles, seeing the same rock formations in the distance over and over again, from a slightly different angle each time.  Every time I’d wonder, and then convince myself that it was my imagination and that I’d know if I was walking in circles.  I had to walk over my own footprints before I’d admit to myself that there was a problem.

But smells were different.  Mostly the desert smelled warm, slightly baked, except at night when the air chilled and I sat in my tent with the door zipped up and my sleeping bag pulled around me and all I really smelled then was my own humanity.  It was comforting in a way.  The flowers were a subtle, light scent, and at first I thought I was imagining it.  Then it came again, carried on a tiny current of air that stirred by hair (grown quite long by then) and tickled my nose.  I stopped, inhaled carefully, and there it was, a sweetness I’d almost forgotten I knew.  So I followed it.

This was the desert though, so I wasn’t incautious.  I stepped carefully, and I checked the sand underfoot for anything and everything; I scanned the horizon for early warnings, and I listened so hard I thought my eardrums might burst.  It took ten minutes, but then a rock formation appeared on the horizon, and the smell seemed to be coming from there.  It took an hour to walk there, but when I arrived I discovered that the rocks were about eight times my height and looked to go quite a long way down into the desert as well.  There were holes and clefts, lots of ways inside, into the caves.  I picked the cleft next to the one where the scent was strongest, and looked inside.

It was shadowy and went a long way back.  I paused here: I had an electric torch still at this point but I wasn’t sure I wanted to wear the battery out exploring a cave that happened to smell nice.  I had no idea when I’d find a way out of the desert, after all.  When I finally decided to get it out and spend just five minutes looking around, I quickly discovered a stash of rag-wrapped, oil-soaked torches in another small cleft at the side of the cave.  Lighting one was easy, and I put my electric torch away.

At the back of the cave where it was already beginning to feel cold, there was a tunnel that I could walk down if I crouched, so I ducked down and kind of duck-walked along.  The torch was much closer to my face now and I could see the slightly-greasy black smoke it gave off and smell the burning oil.  It smelled rancid, and obliterated the smell of the flowers.

At the end of the tunnel it actually got lower still, but I could see dim light ahead and thought that it must open out, so I got down on my stomach and wriggled along, the torch held out in front of me off the ground and my arm and shoulder aching horribly after just two minutes of wriggling.  It took nearly five minutes to reach the grey light, and thankfully the cave did open out, as otherwise I’d have had to drop the torch and wriggle backwards and pray that I’d not missed any side-turnings on my way in.

The cave was about the size of the interior of a small church with the ceiling reaching above my head far enough that I knew that I must have been travelling downhill through all my travelling.  Up at the ceiling there were holes in the rock that were letting in sunlight, but they were small, ragged gaps and the light attenuated as it fell through the still air.  Taking up most of the floor of the cave was a silvery pool of liquid that glistened and shimmered and looked more like mercury than water.

I took a single step towards it, intending just to look at it and see what it was.  I had no intention of touching it in case it was poisonous, and even the idea of drinking from it was ridiculous at that point.  It shimmered and rippled, and suddenly there were waves rushing across the surface of it.  They were small, white-capped waves, maybe a couple of inches high, and they broke on the edge of the pool and splashed just a little way over, but the sudden state change was enough to halt my feet, and I stood where I was, watching.  The smell of flowers rose up from the liquid and was suddenly so strong that I coughed and had trouble breathing for a moment.

When the waves didn’t change any more, I risked another step forward, and then a second when nothing happened from that.  Then I was stood at the edge of the pool, looking into it, and the waves died away as fast as they’d arisen.  The surface of the pool was perfectly flat, and should have been perfectly reflective.  Instead, when I looked into it I saw an image as though from high above, of myself standing on the edge of a cliff.  There was no sign of land below the cliff, just white fluffy clouds in a wide blue expanse.  I looked calm as I looked about, and to my relief I didn’t appear to be about to jump.

Nothing else happened; I didn’t move in the image, and the image didn’t change.  Finally I stepped back, and as I did so the image did move, just for a moment.  Something dazzlingly bright soared up, bursting through the white fluffy clouds and came to a halt in front of me, forming a vaguely humanoid shape.  And then my foot struck the ground behind me, and the surface creased into hundreds of tiny waves again.  I stepped forward, but the surface didn’t still, and the waves grew larger, and I took this to mean that I should leave.

But when I turned around, the low, cramped tunnel I’d entered this cave by was blocked by a rockfall that had either been silent or I’d been deaf while watching that vision.

The Mariner's Angel

They won't let me see my ex-wife; they say she's not in any fit state. They will let me look at the baby, which is in an anonymous crib in a room with twenty-three other anonymous cribs and a large viewing window. Nurses move up and down the rows, smoothing blankets, checking for signs of cot death (I can only hope that when it happens they start shouting 'Code Blue!' but I suspect they don't), and generally looking after the babies. I can tell which crib Julie's baby is in because the crib is oddly ornamented. When I asked about that the nurse's face went vacant, and she drooled until I went away. I hid round the corner and watched, and her face took a good minute to unslacken after I'd left, so whatever hit her was intended to keep her out for a while.
I've seen ornamentation like that before, and that's part of the reason I'm not describing the child as my baby. I don't think I had anything to do with it, not directly anyway. But I remember the ornamentation from the desert.
I was walking more or less south, it was just afternoon and I was heading towards the sun. The sand underfoot was so hot my ankles felt like they were cooking, and the breeze only seemed to go as far down as my knees. There was no shelter around though, and I wanted to leave the desert now, so I wasn't pitching the tent in daylight. Then I took a step and a hole opened in the sand before me.
I froze, before I realised that the perspective had changed and I was stood at the top of a slope down into a valley. Again, the sand became sandstone as I descended, and the at the bottom was a narrow trickle of water in a stone channel. I tasted it warily, and it was clean and cold, so I refilled my water cannister and looked around. To my astonishment, there was a small boat sitting on the bed of the valley. Its hull was the same colour as the sand, and from anywhere else it would probably have been invisible. I went over to take a look.
I think I could have jumped and grabbed hold of the railing on the side, but there was a rope knotted at intervals hanging down so I pulled myself up that way. On the deck, I stopped.
Tied to the mast, looking tired and thirsty, was a man with an ageless face, eyes as green as jealousy, lips as red as a television vampire's and the soft glow of applied electromagnetism all around his back and shoulders. When he saw me his eyes glistened, and the glow solidified briefly into thousands of softly bristling feathers. He was an angel, an electromagnetic angel.
He croaked, and I held out the water cannister, making sure not to touch his fingers as we exchanged it. While he drank I walked round him; the wire binding him to the mast was copper, there was a grey cube at the base of the mast behind him, almost surely a field generator, and there were earthing wire tied to manacles around his ankles.
"Thank-you," he said, holding out the cannister. I took it back; it was empty.
"Why are you here?" I said.
"The Mariner has tied me here to bring luck for his voyages," said the angel. He didn't sound angry or upset, nor even resigned. He sounded matter-of-fact.
"Seems like a dangerous thing to do, leaving you on your own like this."
"It's been three years and two days."
I knew I shouldn't; I'd seen so much in this desert already that I knew I should have walked away and minded my own business, but I reached out to the grey cube and turned the field generator off.
"Take this." The angel threw a coin to me, and I slipped it into a pocket. Then I jumped down from the boat, ran to the stream to refill the cannister, and hurried back out of the valley from the direction I'd entered. I kept my back turned when the light got brighter and brighter and I knew that the angel was hovering on unseen fields of electromagnetic energy behind me, freed from his prison at last. Finally it faded away, and I took the coin out of my pocket and looked at it. It was covered in tiny, dense carvings of strange aquatic things that seemed to have built a city and be inhabiting it. The more I looked at it, the more I felt drawn into it, so I put it away, but not without wondering who -- or what -- the Mariner was.
Those same carvings are now all over the baby's crib, and no-one wants to talk about how they got there.

In Viridian

The angel looked through the bars of the Faraday cage that imprisoned it at the empty workshop. It was silent, though there was a slight static crackle surrounding it at all times, right on the edge of hearing, like an untuned television in a room somewhere else in the house. Tiny little arcs of electricity constantly wrapped themselves around its body. Normally they would be invisible, but the Faraday cage contained it and raised its potential to the point where the energy had to change form in order to dissipate. Left in the cage for long enough, the angel would effectively evaporate. When this was realised, and the comparison with Hawking radiation for black-holes drawn, there had been a proposal briefly to call them Hawking Angels. That had fallen flat however, and was nothing more than an embarrassing footnote in the minutes of many Physical Society meetings.

The angel flexed its wings yet again, testing once more the limits of motion, how well the cage contained it. Fully extended, an angel's wings were like the faintest tracery of magnetic fields in the air. They reached hundreds of feet into the air, and several tens of feet either side of the angel's gaunt, glowing body. They generated enough lift to carry the angel, and they generated electric currents in any conducting object they cut through. An angel could fly through a city as street level and not physically touch a single building, but the wind of its passage left static discharges and lethal currents wherever it blew. While angels walked our earth, people died in epidemic numbers.

The angel settled down again, seeming to wait. There was a soft fluorescence around its eyes that might have been tears, or might have been some natural angelic function. Even at rest it glowed slightly too brightly to look at. People had attempted to view them through smoked glasses and optics designed for watching solar eclipses, but this annoyed the angels and brought a rain of lightning down on those who so dared. Trapped in a Faraday cage, there was at last the chance to see what an angel really was.

In an adjacent room, a young lad with a confident swagger, a broad Essex accent, and a silver shell-suit grinned cheekily, and laid a sun-bed-tanned hand on the doorhandle that led to the room holding the Faraday cage that housed the angel. He had figured out how to trap it by accident, but now he intended to make a name for himself by studying it. His hand tightened on the door handle, and he pulled the door open.

Electromagnetic Angels

Last night I caged the angel. It's now sitting in the cage, slumped with its head almost in its lap, its wings radiating out around it like some brilliant glowing orchid. They pulse with energy, regularly enough for me to think they might pulse in time with a heart beat. It hasn't moved or spoken for a couple of hours, which is a relief. When I first captured it, it howled like a wounded dog until it grew hoarse, and then it cried like a small child. I had to steel myself against it, plug my ears with plasticine and refuse to go near the garage the cage is in until it grew quiet again. I was a modern day Odysseus against the Sirens I'd like to think.

The angel is caught in a Faraday cage. I realised that it would trap them when I saw one get into a car, clearly not knowing either that this would be a problem for it. When the doors closed and just after the driver started the engine, the angel began to glow more brightly, and became visibly distressed. The driver appeared to be trying to calm it down, as she braked and I could see her gesticulating, but the angel just seemed to get more agitated. Then the door of the car opened and the angel fell out onto the road. There was a loud bang, as if the car had backfired, and a stench of ozone that made me choke, and the angel was lying on the pavement, moving erratically and looking dazed, but unharmed. It took it a couple of minutes to recover, and then it lifted off into the air and disappeared over the trees and rooves, heading towards the river.

It took me a few more minutes to work out what I'd just seen: capacitance, and discharge. I checked the pavement, and sure enough there were scorch marks there, and slight evidence of melting. Our angels were electromagnetic.

They're certainly not holy, but then our demons aren't exactly unholy either. Between them they've brought down the major religions of the world, and created all kinds of social problems. In some ways they're like superbugs; how do you kill an angel? Projectile weapons just pass straight through them. Edged weapons work a little, but if you're close enough to use a knife then you're close enough for the angel or the demon to get you, and they can microwave you in just a couple of minutes.

Electromagnetic properties though... it explains why iron edged weapons work a little, they can disrupt the field lines. Perhaps a projectile weapon that's lots of iron filings, or iron shards might work, something that could break the field altogether.

Now that I've captured an angel I've proven some of this. We might have a chance to fight back again and reclaim our world.