Before There Were Angels Read online

  Before There Were Angels

  by

  Sarah Mathews

  ISBN 1482023741

  EAN 978-1482023749

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  ‘Before there were angels’ is published by Taylor Street Publishing LLC, who can be contacted at:

  http://www.taylorstreetbooks.com

  http://ninwriters.ning.com

  ‘Before there were angels’ is the copyright of the author, Sarah Mathews, 2013. All rights are reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters in the novel are fictional. Any similarity to anyone, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  There was a time when everything was perfect, when there was pure love, and pure hope, and pure dreams - pure ecstasy.

  We had it all.

  But that was in the time before there were angels. Avenging angels.

  And some angels will avenge anything.

  When I saw her for the first time, that was it: pure love, even pure thoughts for a second or two.

  She was tall, lithe-limbed, with knowing eyes and Scandinavian white hair that invited me to dive my fingers into it to make her tense and preen.

  Yes, those pure thoughts really did only last a few seconds.

  Astonishingly, my immediate reaction to her was reciprocated. She wanted to rake her hands through my hair (dark and tangled) too and to run them down me as we kissed, as she told me afterwards many times when we reminisced about that first meeting.

  We were a human taste explosion that neither of us had ever experienced with anyone else, and it wasn’t as if either of us was inexperienced.

  Nothing had ever happened to us like this and nothing could again, or so we thought.

  We were magic together from that first moment of that impossible soul fusion.

  And already our best moments were behind us, and not for want of trying.

  Before she became an avenging angel.

  Chapter 2

  That was Rafaella. She was originally called Claire, Claire Allendale, but the Archangel Rafael was the first archangel to stroke her hair whenever she was upset, so she renamed herself after him. I suppose Gabriel would have worked too - Sandolphin and Metatron not so much. They say you don’t pick your archangel; your archangel picks you.

  By the time we were through, and I mean really, really through, Rafaella had a whole detachment of twenty-four archangels stroking her hair and reassuring her that everything would be OK. I never quite understood that because everything would have been OK if Rafaella would just have let things be.

  During the last years of our marriage, the twenty-four archangels gave Rafaella daily advice on anything from which financial investments she should make to how plates had to be rinsed with fresh flowing cold water after being washed in liquid detergent. I was never sure how archangels qualified for this level of practicality but Rafaella assured me that their advice was infallible. Actually, what she mostly said was that she suggested her ideas to the archangels and that they instantly confirmed her instincts, indicating that her level of wisdom was right up there with theirs.

  Given that every decision Rafaella made in the real world was impractical to begin with and disastrous in its ending, I really have to question their infallibility. Rafaella would get an insight into a sure-fire investment opportunity, the archangels would confirm that the investment was a must-do, and a month later our investment was worth about a quarter of our original layout. Whoever was giving her these tips was not so much ‘infallible’ as ‘reliable’ - reliably wrong and not the sort of angel you’d want to take to Vegas with you.

  Rafaella’s brilliant sure-to-be-a-winner decisions embraced every aspect of our lives: where we lived, what car we should buy, where we should eat out, what colors to paint the walls - all of it. Every one of her decisions was about as wrong as it could possibly have been, and I mean according to Rafaella rather than according to me. There was always something catastrophically wrong with the house - it didn’t have the right flow, it contained bad energy, it was too dark, or too cold, or too damp, or the garden was wrong. The cars fell afoul of Rafaella’s critical judgments too - annoying rattles, accident-prone, too expensive to run and the wrong color. Eating out, the food would be good but not the service, or vice-versa, or both were lousy.

  I was confused how Rafaella could pronounce her archangels infallible and yet declare that every choice we made was wrong. When I challenged her on this, she would tell me that the universe regularly changes its mind, and anyway the defects were largely due to my choices - I had upset the waiter here; I had persuaded her to order the wrong dish there; if only I spent as much time in our garden as I did working on my computer, she would be able to live with the garden as it could have been; I drove too jerkily and therefore used too much gas; and so on.

  By the time I walked out on Rafaella, I had well and truly had it. The only really messed up factor in Rafaella’s life was me and I had to go.

  Or was it that I had to stay and become someone else completely, someone who agreed wholeheartedly with everything Rafaella wanted to think, say or do? Mere compliance was no good; I had to think for myself but think the exact same way Rafaella would have thought if she hadn’t delegated that particular project to me. And then there was my resistance to her brilliant ideas, and my subsequent sabotaging of them, so that nothing she ever set out to achieve ever worked. I was a sort of a downscale courtier to Rafaella’s Elizabeth I, the all-purpose all around stooge of the glorious new age Rafaella was ushering in. Maybe so, but I frequently had the disloyal suspicion that Rafaella was just a gulag short of a domestic Stalin, and Siberia can be icy at any time of year.

  “The archangels?” she challenged me one day. “I am now in direct communication with Kumar. He is my guide.”

  “Who is Kumar?”

  “He is the Detailer of God.”

  “What does the Detailer of God do? I mean, what does he detail - cars?”

  This ignorant question provoked an instant snort. “Look him up on the Internet, if you don’t know.”

  Tragically, Kumar’s advice proved to be no less ill-guided than that of the archangels, but that was because I was still around, or worse, on the point of leaving, thus poisoning Rafaella’s future happiness forever. She had devoted her entire life to me (5 years), well the best five years of her life. She was a martyr to me and no real man runs away from his responsibilities.

  But leave I did, in the certain knowledge that no woman other than Rafaella would ever appreciate me and put up with my mannerisms, my smells, my bulges and my infections.

  There was something else I learned with that same certainty: Rafaella was determined to have me back. It was either that or her having to work, and she was never going to waste her days on such loserish mundane obligations.

  Back I would come, and with my tail between my legs (certainly not between hers).

  Chapter 3

  People ask me why I ever got involved with Rafaella. I can’t really answer that except to point out that I am not the only person to have been charmed by her. She has a legion of fans, and a legion of enemies. I switched from a fan to an enemy, not entirely through my own wholehearted choice but, over time, with increasingly willing compliance.

  The truth is, and I will claim this as a truth whatever the philosophical nature of truth or my credentials for accessing it, that Rafaella just went more and more crazy over the five years I was with her. She started out intriguingly eccentr
ic and playful, and ended up as close as you can get to frothing at the mouth without frothing at the mouth, but with eyes bulging and veins throbbing.

  I learned another truth over those five years - that the insane represent a viable, and probably growing, market for a vast range of seductive (if you are utterly insane) products and services.

  The products are, of course, crystals, candles and incense, unless you are a born-again Christian, in which case you can add crosses in all sizes, sometimes of the flaming variety.

  As for the services …

  Let’s start with psychics, as Rafaella did. These are people who can see into your past and your future, and into your soul and your chakras. Rafaella loved psychics. She bounced from one to the next with glee, never quite understanding that they told her exactly what she wanted to hear, just like mortgage lenders, before 2008 anyway. Actually, psychics and mortgage brokers have a lot in common - they cost a lot, they combine being friendly and helpful with being superior, and they get virtually everything that can be verified wrong, and they get away with it again and again.

  Rafaella’s psychics told her that she had lived hundreds of lives, sixteen of them with me, that she was highly evolved as a human being, had acquired all the learning through her many reincarnations that she needed to graduate from the school of life, that she would not be returning here again, that she had many gifts she could offer the world, and that she was about to become suddenly rich and live in exotic places.

  As I said, they get everything wrong, these psychics.

  The cousins of the psychics are the communicators, whether that be with those who have passed over into the light or with a lost cat. Rafaella was never much interested in the great mass of the dead because, after all, she was already in communication with higher beings such as Kumar and others of the Wise Ones or the White Brotherhood (such as Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and various archangels), but she did need to track down our various cats from time to time.

  These animal communicators were impressive, at least to her. “He is trapped in a dark place,” they would say. “He wants to come home but he can’t. I see him in a shed, or a garage, or a cold room. Search the neighborhood.” Alternatively, “He has gone off exploring and lost his way home. Go out and search the fields.” What they didn’t usually volunteer, until every shed, garage and field had been thoroughly gone through several times, was that Tiddles had been squished by a passing car. That suggestion normally surfaced somewhere around Day Three.

  These animal communicators usually had impressive records of finding pet mice in haystacks and snakes wrapped around car engines, not that there was any proof of their claims.

  Moving on a bit - have you ever been cursed? Were you cursed in your last life? Has a friend or family member of yours ever been cursed? Well, if so, fear not, because there are Curse-Finder Generals out there who will chart all your curses and remove them from your lives, suspiciously like a spiritual version of anti-virus and anti-malware software.

  Next door to psychic curses are the cords which those who wish you harm insert into your psychic fields to siphon off your energy. These folks are your psychic vampires, a most alarming breed indeed and one which explains your possible lack of motivation to, say, vacuum the house or pull a double shift at work. If you are under attack by one of these creatures, you may well be doomed to a life of filthy floors and poor job evaluations. To deal with these parasitic monsters, you need a professional cord cutter who will sever these connections via the sun - it is too dangerous to cut psychic cords directly - having taken the precaution of raising their psychic shields. Then and only then will they cut the cords and, whoosh!, the psychic vampire is gone and you should feel a sudden surge of energy, empowering you to fill out a credit card application, or something.

  And if you are a true connoisseur of spiritual services, soul retrieval is where you should be headed. As you have lived your many reincarnated lives, you have become separated from fragments of your soul and you will only become whole again if these fragments are retrieved for you throughout every time and cosmic dimension. Sometimes your soul can become so fractured that parts of it will be found in, say, Detroit, while another piece is resting in L.A., or in new age Mt. Shasta, California. It’s a tricky business finding the parts, though, and this should never be attempted by an amateur. Only a true psychotic - I mean psychic - should attempt this.

  There are some people who have sampled some of these services, and some people who believe in the efficacy of some of these services without sampling them, but only a few people who have dove into every single one of them, as Rafaella did.

  That was just for starters.

  Rafaella discovered through her psychics that she was once a Lemurian, which is a sort of talking lizard, and another time she lived in Atlantis as the waters rose (actually, she drowned that time around). You may not realize it, but there are a lot of secret Lemurians, bearing their Lemurian crystals and dreaming of being reunited in Mount Shasta City or the Chandos Islands, or wherever Lemuria might have once existed, except that it almost certainly didn’t. Former Lemurians all over the world share their memories of Lemuria as surfaced by psychics, and then go off and declare psychic war on Austria and Thailand, or at least that is what they were doing the other day.

  And you absolutely must go swimming with the dolphins.

  You will probably want to get into various alternative medicines too. You can hire the services of a psychic surgeon who will remove your diseased body parts without leaving a mark, chanting surgeons who chant away those same diseased body parts, or distance healers who lock into your personal energy signatures and cure you somewhat similarly to those guys from India who take over your laptop when you need something doing that the computer whiz cannot explain but can do if you will only let him into your system.

  To complete this appetizing smorgasbord, you might like to visit your local homeopath, Bach Flower therapist, oligotherapist, naturopath or kinesiologist.

  For those resonating at the highest levels of vibration, such as Rafaella, there is so much for the open-minded spiritualist to explore, and so little time to do such practical things as cleaning the house or work, especially when my dead relatives took to visiting Rafaella at night to commiserate with the terrible way I was treating her, and when she kept coming across negative entities lurking in the corners of each room, fresh through a portal from hell, in sore need of being swept whence they came with earnest chanting, the burning of incense and the judicious waving of just the right crystal to remove that tricky psychic stain.

  Yes, I lived with all these things …

  * * *

  … and then I lived with Belle, as great a rationalist as Rafaella was a spiritualist, except that she was a rationalist in search of ghosts.

  By the time I met her, she had sought those ghosts everywhere: in the Hollywood homes of the stars where generations of owners had all met untimely and inexplicable deaths, to the Lalaurie Mansion in New Orleans where slaves were tortured and vivisected, to Franklin Castle in Cleveland which burnt down every time someone tried to repair it, to the New Mexico Penitentiary in Santa Fe where eighty inmates were blowtorched to death as snitches, to room 1109 of the Ramada Inn in Salt Lake City where Rachel Longo rained her seven children down onto passing traffic, to the Golden Hill Hotel in Virginia City where two long-dead star-crossed lovers still occupy neighboring rooms and terrorize the guests with the hyperactive contribution of the ghosts of a couple of mischievous children.

  Living with Belle was an instant delight, and instant peace, although that was not how Rafaella saw it. She declared an eternal curse on her in this life by whatever means, physical and metaphysical. It was to be a long siege and not a happy one for anyone.

  It was time for Rafaella to take the gloves off, to raise her psychic shield (Whoosh!), to astral travel, to bring a plague down up any house or apartment we happened to live in, and to torment us, yeah unto the thirteenth son of the thirteenth son.<
br />
  You may believe from my description that Rafaella was some kind of harmless psychotic, sociopathic, schizophrenic, Munchausen’s, Munchausen’s by Proxy, bipolar, narcissistic, megalomaniac weirdo, so long as you kept out of swiping distance of her sharpened butcher’s knife …

  … but she was a lot more dangerous than that, as you are about to find out.

  Chapter 4

  “Darling …” Belle said. “I don’t know how to ask you this …” and that wicked smile.

  “Y-e-s?” (I need to convey the suspicion in my voice here).

  “I think I have found our perfect home. You don’t have to agree,” she added hurriedly, “but would you consider it?”

  This did not sound good - indeed it sounded ominous - but it was Belle, she of the ‘Les Misérables’ waif look at twenty-nine - much the same as she was at six, I would guess - with a thicket of almost black hair insects had been known to tumble out of, and maybe some quite sizeable birds besides. Once in Haines, Alaska, the state where she was brought up, she had been staring perplexed at the white trees when those trees suddenly took flight with bald eagles, some of which had probably first wintered in her hair. Imagine Andie MacDowell for the hair and the sweetness, and Angelina Jolie for the eyes and the street edge.

  Most people said that Belle had green eyes, just like Angelina’s, but I knew they were blue with golden irises that gave them an overall green effect while they remained just that, blue and gold.

  Now she had a project in mind that was as likely to be about as dear to her heart as it was to be detrimental to mine. Whenever Belle got really excited about houses, somebody had died there, memorably and violently, and now she was talking about a home.

  “Tell me,” I replied, forcing a smile.