In the Shadow of Angels

In The

Shadow

Of

Angels

Donnie J Burgess

In the Shadow of Angels

Copyright © 2015 Donnie J Burgess

All rights reserved.

For Mom

-Who insists that I am a writer, despite

such compelling evidence to the contrary.

The town of Ashwood is nestled away between a forest and a mountain just outside of nowhere. You won’t find it on any maps and the residents like it that way. The two square mile area that defines the town’s historical district is meticulously maintained to look like it did at the turn of the twentieth century. No new construction has breached this square in over half a century and any business that hopes to open its doors within, must undergo an extensive vetting process. This before being offered the chance to sign one of the strictest leases ever put to paper. The look is done so well that many major period movies attempted to secure rights to film there - and each was denied.

Ashwood’s town limits extend well beyond the meticulously maintained historical district and the modern world is closing in quickly. Even with some of the steepest property taxes in the nation, businesses and residences alike are sprouting like weeds to threaten the pristine town center. The march of progress defined by seedy strip clubs and destitute trailer parks, like cancer to the vital organs. It is a losing battle, but one which the residents of Ashwood are determined to fight.

But there was much left unseen behind the pristine appearance. Even the town’s name, Ashwood, is a lie

What you learned in elementary school, if you went to elementary school in Ashwood, is that it was named after Reginald Ashwood. Reginald Ashwood was a slave who settled here after becoming a free man in the 1860s. He planted a field of orange trees here and people commonly referred to it as Ashwood’s Grove. Later shortened to Ashwood. It was a wonderful story, but it was completely fabricated. The town was indeed named after the freed slave Reginald Ashwood. However, there was never a grove of trees.

When Ashwood actually became a free man in 1865, he fled Georgia with one Beatrice Turner. Beatrice was the daughter of Reginald’s former owner, Jules J. Turner III. Both Reginald and Beatrice knew what the consequences of their relationship would be and chose to flee to avoid them. For Beatrice, this meant severing ties with her family, and their immense wealth, to live a life of poverty. Which she readily did to be with her beloved Reginald. They fled for weeks before choosing this place to settle. Reginald used his own two hands to fell the trees to build the home they would live in. They would go on to have two daughters, Abigail and Constance, later married to Abigail Meek and Constance Black.

Some three years after they settled, Beatrice’s father appeared at their door. How he managed to find them was a mystery to both. He came to take his daughter back to Georgia. When she flatly told him no, he challenged Reginald to a duel. He produced a small wooden box, which housed a pair of flintlock muzzleloaders. Reginald immediately turned his back and said two things. The first was “You can’t win your daughter’s love in a duel.” And the other was “You’ll have to shoot an unarmed man in the ba…” That sentence was cut short by the sound of Beatrice’s father shooting him in the back. He did this in front of Beatrice and both of his granddaughters.

Immediately, Beatrice picked up the other muzzleloader and shot her father in the head. He fell to the ground, dead. She then took the box which housed the muzzleloaders and sat down on the small porch near her front door. She measured a charge of powder from the powder horn and poured it down the barrel. Not finding any cloth in the box, she tore two pieces of her dress to use as wadding. She sent one down the barrel with the ramrod and tamped it into place. She then dropped the lead ball in and did the same. She put the other piece of her dress into the barrel and repeated the tamping process once more. Satisfied the charge was ready to go, she stood back up, cocked the flintlock back and primed the pan with the priming horn. She turned to her father’s lifeless form and shot him again.

Beatrice grabbed a shovel and started digging. She dug two graves that day. One grave was quite shallow and she rolled her father’s body into it unceremoniously. The other grave was every bit of six feet deep. Here, she laid to rest her husband. Days later, a pastor from a nearby town gave Reginald, but not her father, his proper, Christian sendoff.

Beatrice was an only child and after the death of her father, she inherited his vast estate in Georgia. She never even visited the property. With the help of a local lawyer, she sold off all of his possessions and transferred the money into a nearby bank. With her newfound wealth, Beatrice never spent a penny on herself. The money was held in trust for her daughters. The only money she did spend was for their well-being. That and what would become her lifelong obsession; Reginald’s grave.

She marked her father’s grave with a single, vertical plank of wood, which simply read
Coward and Murderer
, not even mentioning his name. When time erased that plank, it was never replaced. She salted the grave on many occasions though, and even after a hundred years, nothing would grow there.

Reginald’s grave was marked with an enormous polished marble slab - four feet by ten feet. And although their marriage wasn’t actually legal, being a mixed race in the 1860’s, it proclaimed,
Here lies Reginald Ashwood – loving husband and father. Shot in the back by the coward Jules J. Turner III
. But that was only the beginning.

Beatrice never carved a piece of stone in her life, but the day she received the money from her father’s estate, she had a chunk of marble (six feet high and four feet by four feet) delivered to her cabin. She also had a huge assortment of mallets, chisels (straight, curved, toothed, in varying sizes) and rifflers delivered and she started carving the stone. She taught herself the craft through much trial and error. Each time she destroyed one of those huge stones with an errant smack, she would order another and start anew. By the fourth stone, she finally managed to carve out an angel. It was the most beautiful thing a person could see. Standing at over 5’ tall, it was done in life size. She hired men to move it to the edge of the marker for Reginald’s grave.

Each night for months, Beatrice continued with her chisels and rifflers, chipping away pieces here and there so that when the sun was going down, and thus the shadow of the angel would fall on the grave of the coward who murdered her husband, the shadows on the angel would transform its beautiful face, body and wings into jagged, hellish forms. When viewed at the right time of evening, both the shadow falling on that grave and the statue itself looked like demons. But Beatrice didn’t stop with one. She continued carving these angels from the day Reginald died until the day she joined him. Thirteen angels in total over the next twenty-five years.

Once that first angel was in place, people began travelling from miles around to see if it was true that the angels turned into demons when its shadow fell on her father’s grave. When each visitor confirmed it, more visitors would come to see it. When they said where they were going, they didn’t say they were going to Beatrice Turner’s house. They said they were going to see Ashwood’s Grave. In time, local maps added the location as a point of interest. Soon others started to settle nearby, seeing the beauty of the place that Reginald and Beatrice chose to call home.

When the town was working to be incorporated, just before Beatrice’s death in 1893, they planned to name it Turner in her honor. She flatly refused. She wanted the town named what everyone already called it: Ashwood’s Grave. Her death came too soon to see it happen and when the town was incorporated in 1894, they gave it most of the name she requested. Thus, the town became Ashwood.

A beautiful town was built up around those statues. A town whose very name and history is a lie, built on the grave of a murderer and his victim. The true story of which was never written anywhere, and anyone who knew the truth was long dead.

It seems only natural that a town built on such a lie would attract people of a certain type, and it did. From the scientists who opened the Sleep Institute west of town to the psychiatrist who practices on main street. The high-school-has-been to the family judge. The corner storeowner to the accident lawyer. There may be a beauty on the surface, but they are all trapped in the shadow of the angels.

The shadows remember. They hide behind the tombstones of the modest cemetery and scramble from any possible light, hiding from it, the way shadows tend to do, but the shadows never disappear.

Not completely.

Jezebel walked out of the old Catholic church holding a small manila envelope and closed the door behind her. It was just before 9pm and her eyes needed to adjust to the night. She turned to face the church and took in the view as she began to blink it into focus.

The church had marked the center of Ashwood since it was erected in 1893, and its archetypically gothic design was common to churches of the era It was constructed of red brick with a sharp-peaked, shingled roof, a bell tower extending high above the peak and heavy, tall, arched wooden doors. The façade was adorned with  a large stained-glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary, while other stained-glass windows were spaced evenly along the sides.

Like many other churches built before the turn of the twentieth century, it also connected directly to the graveyard. The graveyard was no longer in use, having been moved to a location outside of town to be more socially acceptable to current parishioners, but the grave which was the town’s namesake remained. It made for some beautiful photographs when the sun was out, but under the moonlight, it bore an almost ominous feel. 

Her eyes adjusted to the light, Jezebel began walking toward her car. The entire grounds of the church was surrounded with a black, iron fence that matched the church’s style perfectly. This was added much later to keep the area around the church clear for pedestrians, but meant that parking was set back a hundred yards from the building. She stopped walking when she reached Ashwood’s Grave. 

The moon was nearly full on this late October night, but still low in the sky. Even so, its light was bright enough that it hardly even seemed like nighttime. She could see everything as clear as if the sun was out, though in muted shades. The moonlight shattered abruptly when it reached the thirteen angels surrounding Ashwood’s Grave. It cast its light in shapeless forms around them, refusing to reach into their shadows. The shadows on the angels’ faces, while indistinguishable forms with the moon so low in the sky, were still haunting. Jezebel could see how the rumor of the angels transforming into demons came to be.

She turned from the grave and resumed walking toward her car, but more quickly. As she walked away, the shadows of the angels merged with the shadow of the church and trees beyond. Those shadows met with still others in places where the moonlight dare not shine, weaving a web of darkness into the distance. She felt almost as if the shadows were chasing her. When she finally reached her car, she was glad to see that it was directly under a streetlamp creating an invisible barrier from the darkness.

She shook the thoughts from her head. This was damn sure the last time she would be seeing a priest, it was screwing with her mind.

In the safety of the streetlight, Jezebel took off the knee-length blue dress she was wearing and stuffed it behind the passenger seat of her car. She bent over the side of the car, nearly naked, fumbling around behind the seat looking for her little, black dress. When she finally found it, she slipped it on and got into the driver’s seat. She unclasped the manila envelope, counted out twenty hundred-dollar bills, rolled them up, bundled them with a hair tie and stuffed them under the seat. She left the other ten in the envelope, clasped it shut and sat it on the seat next to her. She pumped the gas a few times before turning the key in the ignition.

Once the car warmed up for a minute, she turned on the lights and pulled out onto Main Street. She drove two blocks and stopped in front of one of the local businesses. She took the manila envelope and dropped it through the mail drop on the glass door. That task completed, she drove a couple miles west of the historic district, scanning the parking lots of the trendier nightclubs as she went. She didn’t see any familiar cars. She wasn’t in the mood to start fresh tonight, so she turned around and headed back to the east. Several minutes later, she was at Turner Road and made the turn south. She slowed down as she neared O’Halligan’s, again scanning the lot for familiar cars. She smiled. Devin was here.

She pulled into the lot, taking care to park well away from the entrance. She took her make-up kit from the glove box, checked herself in the mirror, and applied a liberal amount of eye shadow. What a priest likes isn’t necessarily what others do. She added a generous amount of mascara and an obscene amount of shiny, red lipstick before putting away the make-up kit and exiting the car. Standing beside the car, she slid off her panties and threw them on the passenger floor. She wouldn’t need those. She saw her ultra-tall heels on the floor when she threw her panties down and decided to switch to those too. She took her perfume from the center console and put a dot on each wrist before replacing the bottle. She rubbed her wrists together, and then rubbed her neck to spread the fragrance. Almost as an afterthought, she rubbed it against her crotch too. She tugged up on the center of her dress, using her hands to make sure her ass was showing just a bit. Satisfied that everything was in place, she started walking toward the door.

After a couple of steps, she saw that Devin’s wife’s car was here too. She smiled again. Tonight was going to be a lot of fun.

*****

“Come on, Beth, it’s just a couple of drinks with the guys. What’s the big deal?” Devin said, sliding into the booth next to Beth. He gave her a light peck on the cheek to try to sweeten the deal.

“Fine,” She replied. “Do whatever you want.”

If six years of marriage taught him nothing else, and that was near exactly what he learned from his six years of marriage, it
had
taught him that when she said
fine,
things most certainly were not fine.
Fine
usually meant something much closer to
go right ahead jackass … Do it and see what happens.

“I don’t know why you hang around with them at all, Devin,” Beth said, looking to him with eyes that he really should have been able to read as pleading. “It’s like you’re a different person around them.”

And she was right. The
them
she was talking about were Brent and Jimmy and they were about as different from Devin as they could possibly be. Devin was thirty-two years old and was working at Jackson & Carvey as an attorney (Jackson & Carvey was one of the largest accident and injury law firms in the state). He started out there as an unpaid intern six years ago, fresh out of college. His hard work and thorough research led to some of the biggest payouts in the firm’s history. It was after his third such case, which was settled out of court, but still netted nearly a million dollars for the firm, that he was offered his first full time position –and a six-figure salary.

It was that drive and meticulous attention to detail which led Beth to marry him, after all. She met him during his sophomore year of college when he was the very figure of tall, dark and handsome. He was 6’2” and a very tone, 180 pounds, owing mostly to being an avid swimmer and racquetball player. He was also quite a good golfer, but this was more for networking than for exercise or enjoyment. His face was rather thin and his square jaw and pronounced cheekbones stretched the tanned flesh across them with an effect as smooth as granite, but darker. His eyebrows were dark and remained thin without assistance and his deep, brown eyes were the type that women could get lost in. That is just what happened to Beth. Now, some ten years later, you could hardly tell to look at him that any time passed at all.

His friends were none of that.

Brent and Jimmy were their names and that might as well have been a single name: BrentandJimmy. They were rarely ever seen apart and certainly never spoken of apart. The shame of the BrentandJimmy monster is that you could build from them two average guys. If you add them together, they would be about eleven and a half feet tall and just under 400 pounds. You could split that into two guys that were about 5’8” and 200 pounds each. Unfortunately for them, Brent took up 6’6” of that height and only 190 of the pounds. That left Jimmy only 5’ of the height and 210 of the pounds. When they stood side by side, they looked like the number 10.

The differences didn’t stop there. What one of them got, the other one didn’t. Jimmy was completely bald, but was ginger prior, which left him with all the freckling and light reddish eyebrows. His face was almost perfectly round, if not for the extra chins making the whole facial package seem more oblong. His eyes were so pale a blue, that you almost thought they were colorless. Well, the irises anyway. The sclera was a spider web of dark red veins that never went away. It made him look angry and sleepy at all times.

Brent, on the other hand, was extremely tall and anemically thin. His hair was a thick, curly, brown mess. Imagine a Brillo pad on top of a pencil. His body didn’t appear to deviate in width between his chest, waist and hips, making the pencil comparison even more vivid. If he were to put his arms straight up, you would think you could probably fire him from the barrel of a rifle. You couldn’t though. His nose shot out from his face like the beak of some great bird and his chin stood out from his lips far enough that you questioned if it might be curling back toward his nose. He had one lazy eye, but the laziness depended on where he was looking and sometimes you couldn’t see it at all, which made you look for it even harder. That, in turn, made him self-conscious, which led to a lot of eye movement, resulting in seeing the lazy eye more often.

For reasons well beyond Beth’s understanding, the three of them were virtually inseparable. When they all met in college a decade ago, the disparity in looks wasn’t quite so pronounced - time does have a way of accentuating our flaws. Back then, neither was their particular position on the great totem pole of life. While Devin always knew he was going to study law and had excelled at his classes, BrentandJimmy were far more concerned with frat parties than schoolwork. They both ended up leaving college after four years, but neither of them with a degree. As expected, they both took up
temporary
jobs at the local home improvement warehouse. Those
temporary
jobs lasted them each over eight years and they didn’t seem to have any desire to do anything else. Why Devin still hung out with them was a mystery.

When Devin was with BrentandJimmy, he regressed to his early college years. The drinking would get out of hand, which would lead to one poor decision after another. It always did. The rational part of his brain shut off when the three of them were together.

“Well, if you’re going to get drunk with these idiots, I’m not going to be here for it,” Beth said as she slid out from the booth. “I’ll see you at home. Please don’t be out too late.”

Beth took a step toward the door, but stopped, her eyes having caught something. She turned back to Devin. “And don’t do anything stupid.”

With that, she headed for the door.

Devin was acutely aware he would regret staying when he got home. Maybe he
had
learned something else from his six years of marriage after all. Probably not though, or he would have been smart enough to see that the simplest solution would be to leave with his wife.

Seeing the empty booth, Jimmy piled into it. With Jimmy, he would kind of pile into everything. Booths, cars, his bed. It was really the only verb at his disposal for going from a standing position, to a non-standing one. “Damn, Devin, her ass just keeps getting better with age,” he said, shooting Devin a wink that he hoped would keep him from returning a fist.

“Yeah, that’s why I don’t mind so much when she walks away.” Devin returned the playful remark. It was absolutely true: She looked damn good walking away. Then again, she looked good when she wasn’t walking away too. If he was being honest, she really looked best when she was naked, but he rarely got to see the naked view after causing the walking away one.

Beth, like Devin, was very athletic. While she was only 5’3”, she was still in marvelous shape. She had long, blonde hair reaching midway down her back. Her waist was slim and proportioned perfectly to her chest and hips, giving her the curves of a sexy hourglass. Her face was soft and light; no blemishes from her teenage bout with chicken pox or acne. Her cheekbones were high and her lips seductively full. Her eyes were a tranquil shade of blue the likes of which he had not seen before and never would again. She was a ten by anyone’s definition. If anything, she looked better tonight than she did when they met ten years ago.

“Yeah, but she’s such a goody-goody. Is it even worth it?”

Devin looked at Jimmy wondering, and not for the first time, if he had ever been with a woman at all. The disparity in the change of scenery when he switched from Beth’s ass to Jimmy’s face caused his brow to furrow a bit. “Well, she’s no Brent, but yeah, I’d say she’s worth it.”

“Are you calling me a faggot, faggot?” Jimmy said, giving Devin a playful punch in the arm.

“You’d better watch where you’re throwing those hammy fists. Your girlfriend might get jealous.”

As if on cue, Brent stumbled to the end of their table, four fresh mugs in his hands - Jimmy always drank two to their one. It didn’t have anything to do with weight. Jimmy just liked to get a lot more drunk than either of them did or anyone should. “Now that your mommy’s gone, can we get to some drinkin’, or what?”

“What are we drinking to?” Devin asked, though he knew exactly what the response would be.

“Two?” Brent questioned. “What kind of a pussy are you? We’re drinking till one of us passes out. Throw ‘em back, boys!” That was exactly what he said every time they really started drinking - once the women folk were gone. The women folk in question meant Beth. BrentandJimmy hadn’t been with a woman in years. At least not for free.