A Close Encounter
Author's Note:
Hey guys. You know all those writing prompts you can find on Pinterest and the like? Addictive, aren't they?
Here's the result of 'Falsely Accused'.
You could tell a lot about a woman's moods by looking at her hands, Crowley had found out the hard way*. If they were wringing together, twisting fingers and rubbing one moist palm against the other as though trying to light a fire with no wood, there was a high likelihood of her being nervous, or very sad. On the other hand, if they were soft and gentle, pulling at your arms or your hair, she was most likely happy and playful.
Then again, if they were holding a gun and pointing it at you, she was probably very angry.
The woman currently pointing a gun at Crowley was angry, all right. In fact, 'angry' didn't cover it; the term 'so-bloody-freaking-pissed-right-now-you'd-better-pray-for-release-in-hell-I-can't-even' hardly covered it either. She was breathing heavily, her frizzy brown hair thoroughly dishevelled and sparking with what might have been static electricity, but then again might have been the righteous fury emanating from the woman's very presence. Neatly pressed clothes, which for their severe symmetry might yet have belonged to a posh school's uniform; a cravat; black shoes with sensible heels, with a string of carefully conservative pearls around her neck and little gold earrings shaped like crosses completing the entirely holier-than-thou image. It was as sickening to Crowley as the virgin's blood he was forced to drink whenever he hung out with other demons in hell.
"Hey, lady," he called out, holding his hands out to her in a placating gesture, though she was so riled up at the moment he doubted she would have noticed it if he'd been holding out the crown jewels to her. "What the dev- what the he- What on bloody freaking earth are you doing?"
The woman snarled so savagely it was a surprise for Crowley to see she had no fangs, or forked tongue - or even horns for that matter. He knew she-demons tamer than this creature**.
"Give me back my daughter, you bastard!" she spat, grabbing one of Crowley's most beautiful potted plants from the shelf and lobbing at him with deadly accuracy. Crowley ducked. He supposed he was lucky she hadn't - yet - decided to shoot him, but he did not appreciate having his things thrown at him in his very own home. Honestly. He'd spent months terrorising that carnation into blooming three different colours for him.
"I don't know what you're on about, woman!" he shouted back, stumbling a little further backwards as she took another extremely menacing step towards him.
"Where is she?" she screeched. "Don't lie to me; I know what you are!" She reached into her custom-made tailor jacket and pulled out a wooden rosary with a little crucifix on the end.
Crowley froze. Oh, this was bad. This was extremely, very not good.
Ignoring the little voice at the back of his mind asking him why he didn't just pulverise this wench with a snap of his fingers, Crowley tried the hand-out-y thing again. He tried to wrench his vocal cords back to the smooth, laid-back tone they were normally so attuned to it took an Armageddon or an angry mother to shake them off their usual decibel limit.
"Look," he said, as calm as a raccoon disguised as poodle stealing food from Mafia-trained Rottweilers, "I promise you I don't have a single effing clue who or where your daughter is, I don't-"
The woman pulled back the catch on her gun. It was a tiny little thing. A toy, really. The barrel was intricately carved with vines and flowers and hummingbirds; it couldn't have been more than three inches long, and the little bit of the handle that was visible was covered in mother-of-pearl sheen. Practically a jewel.
It was also approximately three feet away from Crowley, and the latter knew from experience that point-blank shots were not only ruinous to his thousand-dollar Italian suits, they were extremely painful. Not to mention, the body he had adopted all those years ago would be severely damaged. Nothing he couldn't miracle - er, sacril- no, blasph-oh, he knew what he meant - away, but there were some things even a demon's power couldn't erase, like trying to wipe off chocolate sauce from a plate with the last morsel: no matter how many times you swirled it around the plate, there would always be a smear left. There would be an ugly scar, for one, and massive internal bleeding for another. Crowley still wasn't very good at fixing human-ish anatomy; once he had been burned alive for witchcraft and heresy (he'd always been curious to see if the flames would actually hurt***), and healing the skin alone had taken days of painstaking, inch-by-inch concentration. It would probably be better just to get a new body, but that meant leaving this one, his spirit ending back up in Hell, and filing for a new body there was - well, hellish. The paperwork alone!...
So, he settled for trying to calm the little b- er, lady down. It was situations like these that made him regret being a snake.
* Literally. She'd been holding a brick at the time.
** He knew slavering, flame-wreathed, hell-spawned, OneDirection-shirt wearing archdemons who were tamer than this woman.
*** They hadn't, but then the witchcraft allegations had been true anyway****, so conjuring up a little last-minute flame-proofing wouldn't have been a problem if they had.
**** He'd been preparing a curse to put on a flight of stairs leading up to a church. In those days, curses were all about preparation and evil plotting; there wasn't any of the click-n'-go nonsense of these days (even though for his part he'd been quite proud of the new e-bay app. One of his finer ideas). Every thirteenth person to walk up the stairs would trip and inevitably pull down the trousers of the person in front of them. Another of Crowley's personal ideas, after the exact same thing had happened to Aziraphale the day before.
Aziraphale was perplexed.
Bamboozled. Astonished. Flabbergasted. The Thesaurus part of his brain was going overdrive. It did that sometimes, when his immediate attention was busy reeling in shock. And golly, did it have any right to be now!
There was a child in his shop.
An actual, human child. Aziraphale hadn't really encountered one since the last Armanevvahgonnahappedon, which had to have been - what, twelve years ago now? Not even a blink in the lifespan of an angel - particularly this angel - but, well... As a Principality, it was kind of a non-written clause in his celestial contract that he should look out for children when the occasion called for it. Leaving it unmentioned was a bit like forgetting to tell sailors to be careful because the sea was wet. It wasn't necessary. It was pointless. Futile. Absurd. Oh, there went the Thesaurus again.
Aziraphale licked his dry lips and looked straight into the child's eyes. They were big and brown, framed with dark lashes and a mask of freckles all over her absurdly young face. She was pale, around six or seven years old, and her only immediately remarkable attribute was her long, thick auburn hair that hung to her waist and was secured at her temples with two butterfly bobby-clips. She wasn't pretty, exactly, rather too skinny to be considered in the best of health, and her expression reminded the angel a little of a curious meerkat. He didn't know why that comparison sprang to mind, but it certainly fit.
"Hello," he said. Always a good place to start, and no-one alive on earth (at this current moment in time) could accuse Aziraphale of having ever forgotten his manners.
The little girl smiled at him. It transformed her face immediately, splitting it wide into dimpled cheeks, suddenly almond-shaped eyes and a gappy grin.
"Hello." she greeted him back. "Are you a book-seller?"
Aziraphale blinked. No, as a matter of fact he was not. Just because the dusty, graffitied, covered-by-duct-tape* sign above the shop's door written in sixteen-sized font proclaimed the place to be a bookshop did not mean he was prepared to part with a great number of his books. Any of his books, really, although some he wasn't quite sure he would track down literally to the end of the earth, because he either had copies or they were second editions.
"Only if I absolutely have to be." he replied, pushing his glasses higher up his nose to get a closer look at the girl. How had she ended up here? God knew Soho was no place for a child.
"Can I buy this one?" She asked, producing a book from behind her back.
The angel peered at the cover. It was vaguely colourful, but faded with age, with Victorian cartoons depicting a monkey pushing a couple of toddlers around in a pram, wearing a top hat and orange Pompadour trousers.
"Er, no." The angel said, trying to sound regretful. He snapped his fingers gently behind his back. "You wouldn't be able to understand it. It's written in French." And it was so.
The little girl brightened.
"Oh, good! My au pair is teaching me French, and my teacher at school says I'm learning to read so fast I'll be able to read it really soon!"
Sacrebleu. "Oh, sorry, wait - I've made a mistake. That one's in Aramaic." Snap.
The little girl opened the book and squinted at the first line, looking confused for a second. Her mouth worked silently, hoping to make the sounds she was trying to read, then she frowned.
"Oh," she said, very disappointed. "I can't read that."
"No," Aziraphale shook his head, sighing with all the sympathy he could muster. "Indeed you can't." He told himself he was imagining the sense of motherly love that was raging somewhere in his gut, screeching at him to snatch his book back from this evil, over-curious changeling who no doubt burned books as a hobby.
"What about this one?" the little girl asked, walking towards another shelf and plucking out a tome that was bigger than her head and probably thrice as heavy. In fact it was so heavy her thin arms bent as it suddenly dropped off the shelf, nearly causing her to lose her grip on the dusty leather. Aziraphale's heart skipped a beat, went back three, danced the meringue and sputtered to a near stop.
"Er, that one's not for sale."
"Why?"
"Because it's... um, not for children." Not because this was Soho, but because it was The Medievalle Monke'f Guide to Herbef and Flower-Preffing, written in 1213. The original.
The little girl took one look at him; she saw his white-knuckled grip on the table, the rim of white around his irises, and the slight teetering of his frame as she continued to enclose the precious volume in her arms. She shrugged, and placed it back on the shelf. Mercifully, she was careful enough to place it in exactly the same place, and took care not to bend any of the pages.
"I think I'm lost." she said finally, still looking around.
"I'll say." the angel replied weakly, still recovering.
"I was in the shop with my mummy and I got bored, so I hid inside a big box until she'd find me." She glanced back at the angel, her eyes glinting with the kind of mischief only a fellow child could fully recognise the implications of. To Aziraphale, she merely looked satanic. "Like in hide and seek."
"Ah. And, er - did your mother know where you were playing, dear?"
The little girl scoffed, and crossed her arms.
"Of course not. That's the game: she doesn't know where I am, so she has to find me." she said, like it was the most obvious thing in this world. "Duh." she added, as an afterthought.
Duh? Was this a new lexical fad Aziraphale was not aware of**?
"So, how did you end up here if you were hiding in a box?" he asked her, genuinely curious, but also out of the fervent desire to keep her distracted from his books.
She shrugged again.
"Someone took the box. I could feel it moving, like it was being carried. There was already some stuff in there, so I hurt my arm on it." She pulled up the sleeve of her right arm and proudly showed Aziraphale a coin-sized bruise. Aziraphale wondered if he should heal it for her, but then decided that he was quite in enough trouble without actually touching the child on top of it. Lord knew Health and Safety measures were taken to extremes these days, especially around children, so it was probably safer not to get closer to her than necessary. Besides, she'd wanted to buy a book. Two, even.
"Why didn't you get out?"
"I thought it was my mummy playing a joke back on me. I'd played the first joke, so it was only fair to let her do the second one."
"But... How did you end up here?"
The little girl stuck out her lower lip, shook her head then lifted her shoulder in an 'I dunno' gesture.
"I got into a car, I think, and then the box was carried into a building. When I got out of the box, I thought I was going to be home, but I was here."
Aziraphale nearly knocked over his pencil pot.
"Good gracious me, here?" he said, aghast. "What do you mean, here?"
The girl pointed at a corner of the shop, where a big cardboard box was standing, strangely enough the perfect size to contain a skinny six-year old and then some. Aziraphale's heart sank. He knew exactly what had happened.
* He hoped he hadn't been too obvious. Then again, there was always a part of him worrying he hadn't been quite obvious enough.
** It should probably be mentioned at this point that Aziraphale was not aware of the nineteen nineties-ish fad of saying 'cool', let alone the more modern ones of 'duh', 'burn', 'bite me' and 'lol'. He had barely gotten over 'Cor'***.
*** Which, for our non-British or non-Narnia readers, started being used by children especially since - oh, the nineteenth cenury or so. Mary Poppins kind of era.
This is going to be a short one. Only two, maybe three chapters (I need to practice short stories). Please let me know if I should continue or not.