Tangled Mind

Angel was getting used to things here and getting used to how I did, nights. Standing outside, because what else are you going to do. He was my Angel now, had been since that other cold night when I'd been going home, because where are you going to go, and I'd found him and took him with me. It's good to have someone to take with you, someone to look after. Angel knew that. He started looking after me, too.

Somebody asked me if I’d heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I got there, I asked about them. The travel agent rather reluctantly showed me a place called the Island of the Immortals on her map. “You don’t want to go there,” she said.

We walked across Hungerford Bridge in the intermittent rain, skirting puddles and pockets of slush. Below us the Thames reflected empty, parchment-colored sky. When I looked back across the water, the buildings on the opposite bank seemed etched upon a vast blank scroll, a barge’s wake providing a single ink stroke. Gulls wheeled and screamed. The air smelled of petrol, and snow.

“Is everyone going to rise from the dead when the messiah comes?” I ask my dad. He shakes his head. “Of course not,” he says. “Only Jews will.”

This is good news. It means I would have a lot less to worry about than if everyone came back to life.

groliffe

Consider a journey of eight miles. One could walk it in less than an afternoon, in a carriage it would take an hour, or one could conquer the distance in one of Stephenson's steam trains in fifteen minutes or less. Set two towers eight miles apart, and a signal may be transmitted by flashing mirrors in less time than modern science is able to measure. Eight miles is not all that it used to be, yet seek to travel eight miles straight up and you come to a frontier more remote than the peaks of Tibet's mountains or the depths of Africa's jungles. It is a frontier that can kill.