Nora remembered the first summer. It had been unbearably hot, and the new house seemed bent on stifling her. Despite the large open areas and high ceilings, the heat had weighed oppressively on Nora, keeping her awake at night, staining her delicate dresses with sweat during the day.
She hated it.
That first month – before the ether sank its invisible claws into Charles' brain…before Thaddeus became weak and colicky, so much so that Nora no longer knew how to soothe him – the house was still being completed. She resented having moved into an unfinished residence. She resented Charles for his silences, his long tenures in the basement. She resented the heat, the empty spaces, her own solitude; no one to keep her company but the baby and the few remaining workmen.
She had not noticed when the angel had been delivered.
When she mentioned the statue in the garden to Charles, he feigned ignorance.
"Why would I expend money on such a morbid trifle?" he had demanded "I know nothing of angels. I do believe you're imagining it, Nora."
Charles had long ago rejected God in the face of his unswerving devotion to science.
Sure enough, when she persuaded him to follow her into the garden, the Angel was not there. He had laughed at her – not an unpleasant laugh, but one sufficiently dismissive to sting. He thought her soft in the head, delirious from the heat and from the after effects of childbirth.
But Nora saw the angel again. Outside the kitchen window, close enough to touch, had she opened it up and leaned over the sill. Its stone hands shielded its exquisitely carved face. It seemed to be crying.
When she turned her back, it disappeared.
When she began to see it in the house, Nora feared her husband was correct in his hypothesis. She must be hysterical – too much time alone with the baby. Not enough human contact. The angel seemed to be stalking her. She woke once in the night, and stumbling down the hallway to the bathroom, heavy with sleep and the last shreds of dream, found it waiting in silence at the far end of the hall. She felt haunted by it – increasingly convinced it wanted to tell her something. To keep her counsel. To remove her from the oppressive atmosphere of the house.
And then the blue box came. She didn't understand it, even now, though she had gone over the events in her head many times. A man in a long brown coat with scruffy hair, and a small blonde girl dressed most indecently. She had assumed (or rather, decided to believe) that they were more of Charles' workers, come to complete the house. But they had spoken in a strange manner. They had carried such strange tools.
Charles knew nothing of the blue box or its unusual custodians. He had remained in the basement whilst the man and his…associate had scoured the house, asking Nora occasional questions which she barely understood, let alone knew how to answer. When she tried to talk to him about it, after the fact – long after the stone Angel stood, motionless, in the attic ("Not a problem!" the man in the coat, who called himself The Doctor, had said. "You're safe now. Welllll…mostly safe. I'd say ninety eight percent safe. Just don't move that mirror. Alright?") – he'd accused her of hysteria.
Nora had stopped talking about it, then. But she remembered.
She remembered The Doctor, the blonde girl, and the blue box.
She remembered the stone angel, eyes wide open, regarding its own countenance in the mirror, face twisted in horror.
And the Angel remembered.
The Angel remembered all things.
