His Angel
By Patricia Russo

It started when Phil was dying, or, rather, not dying. The same afternoon Rachel and Phil's sister brought him home from the hospital, my candy dish sprouted fur. A couple of days later, it grew six knobby, naked gray-green legs and took to scurrying around the top of the coffee table, for all the world like a flat, mutant gerbil. It would scrabble across the table to one edge, stop, then shoot across to the opposite edge, stop, then crawl, more deliberately, to the edge again.

I stopped polishing the coffee table. I abandoned the candy, the little heap of butterscotch disks and wrapped mints. They looked so weird nestled in fur.

They brought Phil home from the hospital because it was what he wanted, to die at home. Or so his sister said. I used to see her in the hall all the time, those first few days. She hadn't come around much before, not even when Phil first got sick. His girlfriend, Rachel, had just moved in when they got the news. Everybody expected Rachel to pack up and leave, but she stayed. The sister told me they didn't even have a home health aide. Rachel was doing it all.

"She's an angel," the sister said, her eyes shiny with tears. "Phil's so lucky to have someone like her."

I asked the sister to come in for a cup of coffee, but she said she had an appointment. Damn it. I wanted to show someone the candy dish.

Obviously the thing was trying to escape. It kept going to the edge of the table. As far as I could tell, it was eyeless, but somehow it sensed the drop to the floor and backed off.

I called Phil a couple of days after he came home. "Do you remember my candy dish?"

"Vaguely." The TV was on in the background, and Rachel must have stepped out, or been in the bathroom or something, because Phil actually answered the phone himself. He sounded pretty good, considering; I'd seen the transport guys carrying him into his apartment on the kind of stretcher ambulances use. Phil had looked like a yellow stick under the tight sheet and the straps binding him down.

"Did you give it to me?"

"I don't think so." He coughed, then said something that might have been Help me, but Rachel must've come in and taken the phone, because for a while I could only here the TV babbling, then two voices. Sharp toned. Hers and his, I figured.

"Hello?" I said.

Rachel came on. "Hi."

I couldn't ask her about the candy dish. She hadn't even known Phil two years ago, which was when I thought he might have given it to me. "How's everything?" I said.

"Great. Phil's doing really great, settling in."

"Great."

"He'll be up and about in no time."

"Great," I said. "Listen, Rachel, you want to come over for a cup of coffee or something?"

"Maybe tomorrow. I've got piles of laundry to do today. I'll call you, okay?"

"Okay."

Damn it again. I looked at the coffee table. The candy dish had hunkered down next to the TV remote for a nap or something, but it was still furry, and still six-legged. A couple of times I had woken up in the middle of the night and come out to take a peek at it, hoping it would just be a plain gray-green, rectangular, furless and legless candy dish again. This hadn't happened yet.

I thought about calling the super, but it always took him weeks to respond to the messages you left on his machine, even if it was an emergency like the toilet exploding. Besides, what could I say? Please hurry up here and look at my dish?

Phil was the one I always called when I had a problem, or if I just wanted to hear another human voice. We moved into the building at almost the same time, kept running into each other for weeks at the discount store buying curtain rods and bath mats and stuff like that, so it was like we had this bond.

I was pretty sure he had given me that candy dish.

A couple of days later I saw Rachel in the hallway, and she was grinning, beaming like a little girl who'd just got a pony. Rachel scared me sometimes, even before Phil got sick. She was older than him, older than us, I should say, since Phil and I were born in the same month and the same year. We used to joke we were almost twins. Rachel had gray hair and she was made of steel. She and Phil had dated only a month or so before she moved in. "What Rachel wants, Rachel gets," Phil said, laughing. Then he went to the doctor for a routine physical, and one test came back funny, and he had to go for more tests, and it turned out he had liver cancer, so advanced the oncologist was actually honest with him. "There are no real treatment options at this time," Phil said the doctor said. Phil smiled and made a joke, like But maybe next week. Rachel didn't smile. "He won't die," she said. It'd been two months, and she was still saying it.

In the hallway, grinning all over her face, she showed me the ring. She must've bought it herself; Phil certainly couldn't go out engagement-ring shopping. Plain band, single solitaire. Modest, elegant. "Congratulations," I said, but what I wanted to say was, Does Phil know?

"We're keeping it quiet for now. A June wedding, we think. What do you think?"

"Great."

Her eyes were as flat and hard as dimes, her back as straight as a rod. Her skin looked as gray as her hair, as if her whole body were turning metallic, but that might have been just the lighting in the hall.

It was October. A June wedding?

"Rachel, come into my apartment for a minute."

"Sorry, can't, I'm in a rush. I have to get to the post office."

So I called Phil. "A June wedding?"

He coughed, hard. The cancer was in his lungs now. Really, it was everywhere. "What Rachel wants, Rachel gets," he said. That old phrase, but now with no smile in his voice.

"How are you doing, Phil?"

"Tired. I'm tired of all this."

"Phil, my candy dish grew fur and is walking around on the coffee table."

He was silent for a moment. "Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Energies," he said, or at least I thought he did. His voice was weak. "What's it doing?"

"Trying to escape, looks like."

"I'm not surprised," he said. "Come see me. When are you going to come see me?"

"I'll come now," I said, but it turned out I couldn't, because his apartment door was locked and Rachel was out at the post office and Phil couldn't get up to let me in. Almost a week later I cornered Rachel in the lobby and got her to take me upstairs and allow me a visit. "I'm practically Phil's oldest friend in the city," I said, and Rachel couldn't deny it. She was coming in from a trip to the grocery store, two shopping bags in each hand, which I didn't offer to help her with.

"Just for a minute, okay?" she said. "Phil still gets tired easily."

She wore the ring, of course, and a sharp smile as brittle as ice. Phil looked like crap, which was no surprise. Two eyes burning up out of a nest of sheets and quilts, TV set low now droning in the corner, pill bottles and pads and ointments, bedsore stuff, on the bureau, more pill bottles and a plastic tumbler with a sippy straw on the night table, portable potty on the other side of the bed. Though it was chilly out, Rachel had a window open to cut the sickroom stink; it didn't help. You could smell death as soon as she opened the apartment door.

Phil smiled when he saw me. "Long time."

Rachel went into the kitchen and started putting groceries away. Loudly.

"How are you doing?"

"Lousy."

"Yeah."

"You?"

"Well, my candy dish. I told you. It has legs and fur and runs around the top of the table. It wants to jump off, I'm sure. But it doesn't have the courage."

"Do you want it to? Escape."

No. I wanted it never to have happened, for the candy dish never to have transformed itself, for things to be normal, for nothing to have changed. Second best - for it to change back and stay that way, so that after a while I would scarcely believe the weirdness had ever occurred; if I ever remembered, ever talked about it, it would be a funny story, amusing and insignificant.

"Help me," Phil whispered, and then we both heard Rachel's step in the hall. His expression changed. I glanced at her, striding into the bedroom like a general, and when I looked back at Phil he had stopped breathing.

Oh, I thought, oh, and I went for the phone, because that is what a person does when another person stops breathing. You call 911. They teach you that in school, even.

Rachel was carrying a cup, tea maybe, or soup. I couldn't tell; its aroma was swallowed up by the pee, sweat, and medicine smells of the room. She set it down carefully on the one bare spot on the bureau, strode over to the bed, and took Phil's face in her hands. She leaned forward, bending until her forehead met his.

I got a busy signal, hit redial.

Rachel's head moved downward, brushing Phil's skin, across his mouth, down his chin; she paused at his throat, then continued on to the center of his chest.

Busy signal. Redial.

She looks like a vampire, I thought, shit, you could snap this scene and use it on a horror movie poster, and just as that thought zipped through my mind Phil shuddered, a violent shudder that made the iron bed frame rattle, and he sucked in a long breath. Then exploded into a paroxysm of coughing.

A reverse vampire, forcing life into a victim, instead of bleeding it out….

"911. What is the nature of your emergency?"

"Hang up," Rachel said.

"Police, fire, or medical?"

"He's all right," Rachel said. "And he doesn't want to go back to the hospital, anyway. You know that." Slowly, she straightened. I was on the other side of the room, but I could see her hands trembling as they neatened the covers. I could also see Phil's eyes, black holes in a parchment face, burning with despair.

"No emergency," I whispered, and hung up.

"I brought you some soup," she said to Phil. "Chicken noodle. Your favorite."

So that's what it was.

Rachel turned, and I backed out of the bedroom. I didn't want her to look at me. I didn't want to see her eyes. Seeing Phil's was bad enough.

Whatever Rachel wants…

As I crossed the threshold, the air crackled.

One morning a couple of weeks later, very early, Rachel knocked on my door. She walked right in, went straight to the coffee table, looked down at the furry candy dish darting from edge to edge, and burst out laughing. "I can take care of that for you," she said.

"No thanks," I said.

She shrugged, said, "Suit yourself," and left, still laughing.

Phil's sister calls me once in a while. She hasn't been to visit him for ages, and I'm guessing she feels guilty. She's got kids, though, and some kind of paralegal job, and she lives in the suburbs. "That Rachel is such an angel," Phil's sister says, and I sort of mumble something that must sound like agreement, and I watch my candy dish scurry, and wonder when I will find the courage to let it go.

The End

Story copyright Patricia Russo, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com