"An angel," the old man scoffed with gruff incredulousness. He spoke the handful of words in his native language. "What kind of fool do you take me for?"
Ripe offense and confusion radiated from the soul of the sick and recovering man in undulating, suffocating waves. Erik stood in the room with all the tender awkwardness of a schoolboy called to the headmaster's office for the first time.
It had all been going so well.
The first time he had appeared in the room of Christine's recovering father, the old man had been in such a sleepy, druggy daze that playing the angel had been gleefully easy. A violin would have drawn too much unwanted attention from the busy staff making their rounds just outside the hospital door, so Erik knelt beside the hideous contraption they called a hospital bed and hummed into the man's large ear. The melody that came out was the same that had been haunting him since that night he had made that fleeting contact with the tips of Christine's fingers, offering him a glimpse into the complexities of her soul.
The song, shaped like her, warm where it needed to be with just that slight warble where her darling imperfections lay, crawled into the tunnel of her father's ear with the ease of a child returning home after a long trip away.
"Christine," the father breathed, his fingers instinctively flexing into the shapes of the violin chords. Erik understood this reflex, which signaled a true musician, one that could not distinguish his instrument from one of his own appendages. There had been times when he had found himself in captivity, stripped of his belongings, of his humanity, left with very little but to perform the very same motions as they helped him maintain the tender threads of his sanity. "My Christine. It's her, Angel, it's her."
He returned two more times after that first night, leaning into the man's ear to hum another segment of the composition he himself had not yet have fully completed, yet would lie awake each night feverishly rehearsing and editing in his head. Each time those same weathered hands would work their phantom chords until they had been well practiced and the ailing man would then finally nod, mutter an exhausted word of thanks and drift into a morphine-laced doze.
Presently, however, he stood before a fully alert individual who had seemingly recovered from his post-operative, narcotic assisted delirium. Erik told himself he should have noticed the difference the moment he stepped through his gateway to the room of the peacefully slumbering man. Had he noticed the subtle signs, he would have informed Christine he had done all he could, that his end of the bargain had been settled—he had still been so saturated in his own timidity, that he had yet to see her again since the night they made their strange deal. It was only when he leaned over to begin his practiced, heavenly rouse that the man jerked awake with a flustered, 'Who in God's name are you?!'
For the first time in his long existence, Erik almost forgot the name he had claimed for himself in his youth—a small, yet false badge of identity that he had carried with him as feeble proof that he was an individual of worth.
"Answer me," the father asked, his hand gripping a little remote control attached to the bed in his hand as though it were his only lifeline.
"Christine sent me," he blurted out, not knowing what else to say. Why was he shriveling like a little coward before this feeble man?
"Christine! How do you know her? She is a smart girl; she would not spend her time with—"
The song was torn from his lips before he could second guess himself and there she was, standing before him there in the room, or at least, the very outline of her etched out in sound. He knew the other man in the room could not see her, but he was skilled enough to hear her at the very least. With his abject insecurity clutching at his throat, he managed to sing the first section of the song, despite the slight quaver in his voice.
But when he reached the rocky shores of the song, where the refrain belonged but was not yet written, he ceased. This was where the dark parts of her lay. The places he feared himself to tread and could not bring to song, the parts of her the mirrored him too closely.
There was a claustrophobic silence for several minutes.
"I seem to remember a dream—" the father muttered, more to himself than to anyone else in the room.
The door opened at that very moment and a nurse clutching a manila folder in one hand entered the room like a woman spinning a thousand plates. She took one look at the scene and huffed.
"I'm sorry, sir, visitor hours don't start for another hour," she said in a tone much like that of an exasperated mother breaking up a fight between two children, that suggested she was not sorry in the least. She stopped her movement towards the computer in the back of the room to take in Erik more fully. Her eyes focused in on his unkempt appearance, his dusty, threadbare suit and his uncombed hair. He could sense the suspicion coming from her and she raised a dark brow. "Mr. Daaé, is this man bothering you?"
Erik opened his mouth to offer a weak excuse.
"Not at all," Viktor Daaé replied warmly, in thickly accented English, "Angel, here, and I are old friends."
The father's defense of him had an odd impact which he found a bit disconcerting and, the nurse, who seemed to have some keen ability to read Erik's subtle, shocked expression didn't seem to buy into the lie either.
"Are you sure?" she asked again, her eyes wary and the suspicion from her growing stronger.
"He isn't much to look at," Viktor admitted with a cluck of his tongue, "But few struggling musicians are."
The nurse sighed; her hackles lowered.
"Mr. Angel," she said with exhausted patience, "Visiting hours are for immediate family only. It's the hospital policy."
"Angel is adopted family," Viktor shrugged smoothly.
The nurse let out a frustrated breath.
"If you want to come visit your friend, you need to come during visiting hours. They start in an hour; you can go to the waiting room until then." She then began her work checking IV bags.
"I look forward to your visit, Angel," Viktor said with a serious lift of his brow and an unspoken command in his eyes.
"Yes," Erik muttered as he stumbled out of the room and into the noisy, brightly lit hall of the hospital wing. Doctors and nurses were making rounds, and most were too busy to pay him any mind, though he did catch an eye or two as he hastily made his way down the hall, following little signs as he went, towards the waiting room.
There were vibrations here. He had felt them from the first day he arrived. Reapers. Each with their own individual frequency. One had an ethereal softness to it, like it was produced by a glass harmonica. Today, however, there was one he was certain he recognized. It grew louder, reverberating through him as he made progress down the hall.
He entered a nearly empty waiting room. The seats had all been moved around to accommodate 'social distancing' guidelines. Many had circular stickers tacked to their backs to remind visitors of a pandemic that had interfered with their daily lives for over a year now. And there, in the corner of the room, staring down at a magazine on the table, was Iris.
"Hey," she said, with all the casualness in the world, as though she had been expecting him this whole time, "Get over here. I need your body."
"What?" he asked, flummoxed.
"I need you to turn this page for me," she chuckled, then pursing her lips in a manner which made her look most immature she said, "What did you think I meant, you ol' perv?"
He rolled his eyes and tried to decide if he really needed to bother visiting with the father after all.
"Seriously, though," she insisted with feigned impatience, "I can't move things in this world. I can't turn this page and I'm really trying to get the scoop. Bennifer got back together."
Resigned to spend the next hour with this nonsense if he must, he approached the table where the tabloid sat with an excited Iris beaming. He reached down and quickly flipped the page of the open scandal mag to show an article featuring two people, a man and a woman, caught walking down the street in what he could only describe as the world's most awkward embrace while looking at the camera with unpleasant expressions on their faces.
"They look exceedingly unhappy," he observed.
"No duh, I wonder how long it's gonna last," she replied in a tone that was far too giddy, "I think they're having a midlife crisis together."
"Don't you have other things to do with your time besides finding enjoyment in the misery of others?"
"Don't you know how to chill out?" she quipped. "What are you even doing here?" she asked with dismissive interest, then paused and looked at him, her eyes growing large and bright with renewed fascination, "Oh wait…are you here to gobble some dude's soul…is there like," at this she looked excitedly around the room as though to find some monster standing in the room, "An Angel of Death here?"
He stiffened.
"How do you know about that?" he asked with sudden intensity.
Her eyes grew even larger with her interest and her mouth gaped in surprise.
"I was just fucking around—but holy shit—I was right?" she asked in a rush, "How are they doing it? Fake heart attacks? Too much insulin?"
He scowled at her.
"What are you talking about?" he snapped.
"What is the nurse using to—you know—do them in?" she asked while slashing a finger across her throat in a macabre gesture.
He began to get the sense that they weren't talking about the same thing.
"Ah," he sagged in faint relief. "No. I am not here to collect."
She threw up her hands in exasperation.
"Then what the hell were you talking about just now?"
"Nothing," he bristled, "I merely found it peculiar you would have knowledge of a moniker I held in my youth."
"Angel of death," she quirked a brow, then chuckled to herself. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You must not have been a good dude to have become an Eater. So, what—did you kill innocent people in their sleep?"
"No," he calmly replied, "I killed them while they were awake."
She paused for a spell to contemplate before saying, "Will you turn this magazine to the cover? I want to see what year it is."
"It's August of the year Two Thousand and Twenty-One," he replied without obliging her request.
She sighed.
"I have so much more time to go," she responded sadly while placing a hand over her eyes. "It's only been five years." This last was said with such abject despair it struck him.
"What are you doing here?" He didn't know why he felt compelled to ask, but something about her sudden descent into darkness resonated with him.
She rubbed her face with both hands as though to eradicate the spontaneous melancholy and took a seat in one of the vacant chairs.
"I'm here to help move some people on," she said. She adopted a disgusted expression to add, "It's going to be a mass casualty. Some yahoo shot up a liquor store down the block. I think they're always the hardest. Tragedy aside, I've never enjoyed working with groups and I'm terrible at public speaking."
The faint din of yelling and rushing of carts could be heard down the hall. Sirens blared somewhere outside.
"What are you really doing here, yo?" she asked while crossing her legs, as though settling in for a very important conversation.
"Visiting a friend," he replied distractedly as a couple walked into the waiting room and sat in the set of chairs on the other side of the room.
Her eyes narrowed at him.
"A friend," she repeated with skepticism.
He turned his attention back to her.
"You don't think I can have friends?" he lowly growled, crossing his arms aggressively.
"I'm just saying that I don't think you're Mr. Friendly. I practically have to use a crowbar to get small talk out of you," she shrugged.
"Small talk is tedious," he remarked coldly. He heard shuffling and noticed the couple on the other room had stood up and were eyeing him carefully as they exited the room. He turned to Iris who was laughing quite gleefully.
"They can't see me," she managed between fits of giggles, "You just look like some dirty dude talking to himself."
He swiveled his head to glare at her but resigned himself to huff quietly to himself and take an adjoining seat beside her.
"Are you, like, from the 1700s or something?" she asked with mild interest.
"Why do you think that?" he asked with tired impatience.
"I don't know," she gave a noncommittal shrug, "Because you're ridiculously stuffy. You seem like a guy who spent his entire life wearing uncomfortable clothing and listening to that kind of classical music that always gives me anxiety. At any rate, you are totally an anachronism. You definitely give me old timey vibes."
"I died in 1885," he sighed, glancing at the clock. This asinine conversation had only stretched a smattering of minutes.
"It shows," she grinned, and he thought she somewhat resembled the Cheshire cat in human form. "You definitely have not updated your operating system since then."
Two nurses and a doctor rushed through the waiting room. The doctor was hurriedly adorning his scrubs. Erik thought they looked like soldiers rushing to battle. He could feel the power of their stress as it rolled from their souls and dispersed about the waiting room. The murmuring chaos down the hall could still be heard, growing in intensity and volume. More sirens pierced the morning sky. Through the windows, the sun was illuminating the city, but the terror and anxiety rumbling down that hall made it seem as black as night.
"You will have a number of frightened souls awaiting you, I imagine," he mused.
"Usually," she replied, he shoulders drooping like dying roses. She eyed him thoughtfully. "But what prompted you to say that?"
"I can feel their souls," he remarked. His eyes still trained on the ugly automatic doors leading to that fateful scene one long hallway away.
"Wait," she sat up, rigid as a pole, "You can feel souls? Like, just sitting there?"
He turned to her and furrowed his brows.
"Only if they are in a heightened state of emotion. You cannot?"
She shook her head, a perplexed expression adopting her face.
"I only get the image of their final moments, sometimes the days leading up to it. I only feel them once they've passed and only when I touch them."
"Peculiar," he murmured as he leaned back to consider her with renewed interest. He reached with his hand and placed two tentative fingers on the portion of her knee exposed by her ripped jeans. "Your soul is kept from me."
She raised an amused brow.
"Are you trying to get fresh with me?"
He jerked his hand back and crossed his arms dismissively.
"Don't be absurd," he grumbled, "I was only attempting to read your soul."
"Good god," she made a piteous groan. "They really gave you all the worst magic tricks, didn't they? How much of a person can you see if you touch them?"
"All of them," he quietly replied and closed his eyes against the awful, but beautiful memory of Christine and her terribly perfect boy.
"But you can't see me," she said, and leaning back in her seat, she gave a little hum of relief. "Thank god for that. You don't want to know what it's like in here." And she gave her temple a small tap with her finger for clarification. "I'm sure as shit that I could probably say the same for you."
That tinny, high humming that had been in the foreground since he came into the hospital started to increase in intensity. It moved through him with all the pleasantness of a warm spring breeze and contrasted with the heavy drone that came from Iris.
A small child, not more than five years old, clad in a pink polka dotted pajamas, walked through the doors that lead down the hall to the chaos of doctors and nurses working frantically on the victims of the nearby shooting. Her freckled face brightened when she spotted Iris, erupting into a smile wide and missing two front teeth.
"There you are!" she crowed. "Is this your friend? He feels really scary."
"He's a soul eater," Iris replied cheerily. "How are you doing, Abby?"
The little girl shuffled to the chairs, her bare feet making not a peep on the scuffed, off-white linoleum flooring of the waiting room. She sat beside Erik and gave him a poke with her little finger.
"You feel scary, but you don't look that scary," she said with a quick giggle. "I thought you would look like a monster. That's what I heard soul eaters are supposed to look like."
Traditionally Erik would feel a twitch of enjoyment from such a casual and unintentional compliment, but he was far too confused by the sight of a child reaper. He had been walking this ugly plane of existence for a century plus thirty-six years and until now he had not truly seen one for the first time. There were memories of them, passed on from his predecessors, trapped in his head and preserved like insects in amber. Children who helped the souls of babies and children cross from one realm to the next.
He was unaware how intense his stare was until Iris cut into his thoughts.
"They volunteer," Iris said. "They aren't like us. They aren't paying a price. They do it because they want to."
"Yes, yes," he muttered as he took in the little girl, wide eyed and looking back at him like he was the strangest thing on the planet—though, she may not be incorrect. "I know. It's only…" he trailed off, his body feeling warm and cozy. A peace and joy rolled into him.
"She feels comforting," Iris said, as though filling in his thoughts. "They get their own tricks too. She can make others feel at ease. And she doesn't wait around like we do, but she won't tell me where she stays when she's not here."
"It's a secret!" the child laughed.
"Where do you stay, if not on this earth?" he asked Iris, and it occurred to him that he suddenly felt comfortable and eager to have a conversation, as though he could stay in that waiting room until the universe ended. He looked at the child, Abby, and understood why.
"I hang out in the grey void," Iris groaned in response, but her posture was just as relaxed as his. She, too, was clearly under Abby's euphoric spell. "Like standing in fog, or smoke. It's hard to describe, but there, I'm alone and its quiet. Then I find myself here, out in the world, with color and light and sounds and birds and people and shit and it's the best feeling in the world. But then the pull happens, and I know I've gotta go tell someone they've just died, and I've got to tell them they were murdered—sometimes by someone they loved. It's the effing worst. It's also part of my fucking sentence." Her words were slow and sedate, lacking the bitterness he knew would likely be there without the presence of the child.
"You would think that death would no longer bother you," he replied as that incredible sense of calm and relief flooded his body like the druggy haze of opium, softening his inhibitions.
"Hell no. I was always freaked out by death," she crossed her legs gently. "I pretended like I wasn't, but I usually covered my eyes when people killed others on tv."
"I had a comfortable relationship with death," he mused, "Too comfortable perhaps; I once slept in a coffin," then he shrugged with easy nonchalance.
Abby clapped her hands over her mouth with silent, amused shock.
"A coffin? Really?" Iris gaped. "Wow, you were kind of a loser, huh? Don't you think women would have been a little weirded out by how heavy handed you were with the whole Nosferatu vibes? Or at the very least, they would have assumed you were some sort of deranged murderer." She chuckled.
"I was a deranged murderer," he quipped dryly, but did not find he was annoyed by her comments in the slightest.
She stared at him pointedly for an long stretch of time, which would have traditionally made him irritable. Finally, she shook her head, chuckling quietly to herself, and simply said "You're an odd dude, Erik."
"He's funny!" Abby agreed.
The hissing of the automatic doors filled the space, but he was far too comfortable to care about the new person walking through the waiting room, not even when he could feel the familiar, unwelcome sensation of eyes upon him.
"It's you," the new guest announced with terrified surprise.
He raised his eyes to meet those of Christine, who stood there with all the wariness of a feral cat preparing to flee.
"Christine," he straightened in his seat as his spontaneous discomfort battled the influence from the child. "This is a surprise."
"I'm here to see my father," she stammered. Her hands shook, nearly imperceptibly, as she clutched at her purse as if it were some magic talisman of protection.
"Is that your friend?" Iris asked with more interest than he felt necessary. "You're friends with one of the living?"
"She's pretty," Abby chimed in, "Well. She has a mask on, but she looks pretty to me, even with it."
He ignored them, standing up slowly, the pleasant calm from Abby still saturating him thoroughly.
"Oh!" Abby squealed with excitement, flying out of her chair and scampering away like a little mouse on the hunt for crumbs. "I have to go! Bye!" she called, not even sparing a glance back, as she ran through the doors leading to the madness down the hall.
The peace in him dissipated, allowing for the thundering in his chest to take over, the sudden unease of standing before this woman whom he found himself tortured over.
"Yes," he managed, "Your father. He requested to see me. I fear he no longer believes me an angel."
Iris whistled beside him. "Damn, Erik," she clucked with mock disapproval. "You must be really crushing for this girl."
"Will you desist?" he hissed with enough force to make Christine jump back in fear. "I apologize, my dear" he quickly added, with the most assuring voice he could manage, "This nuisance here is being inappropriate." He gestured to Iris in the chair.
Christine followed his finger, and the look of personal concern did not disappear.
"Yeah, she can't see me, bro, remember?"
He sighed.
"Please," he insisted, "You must believe me that there is an individual in that seat, and they are quite tedious."
"Okay," Christine whispered.
Iris stood from her seat and came behind Erik, patting him on the back with what he could only interpret as sympathy.
"Sorry, dude, I'm gonna run, there's another buddy of mine I want to talk to before I gotta act as escort," the other reaper said, "But good luck with….whatever the hell this is."
With that, she was gone, leaving him alone with the object of his affection—who was already terrified of him, but must now think him beyond mad. With a heavy exhale, he gestured to the seat Iris had just vacated.
"Please sit," he softly commanded, dread blooming in his chest with full force. "I suppose I have no choice but to tell you what I am."