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She stood at the corner watching him walk down the street with long easy strides. She waited until he had gone far enough for her to follow discreetly, then went after him. He didn’t go far. A few streets away he stopped at a small church. This is stupid, she told herself for the hundredth time. This tied in exactly with his story. He was a charity worker, a type of outreach worker, perhaps. The flat was there for people just like her and the simple answer to all of her questions was that he just didn’t want to get involved with one of his ‘cases’, didn’t want to frighten her off with his bible bashing.
She followed up the steps. She’d have the baby and go back to her step-father. Even he couldn’t turn her away with a baby in her arms.
The church was empty. The tall, cold vaults loomed above making her feel very small. Her shoes clattered conspicuously in the silence as she walked up the aisle. Tall alabaster figures watched her from alcoves as she made her way to the altar.
“Uri?” She said, the strange name echoing hollowly. No answer.
A door to one side was pushed ajar, a fain light splashing the tiled floor. She cautiously pushed the door open into a dark anteroom. The dark was complete, though. At one side another door was framed in light. Each seam burst forth a bright beam of intense white. Its rays cut through the gloom like knives. What could possibly burn so brightly? A fire? The thought panicked through her mind but she felt no heat and the brass doorknob in her hand was cool. With a single strong-armed motion she flung it aside.
The brilliance crashed against her face like a palpable wave and she screwed up her face to keep back the deluge. There was no detail of the room beyond the door, just a whiteness so pure that, just as the dead of night is an absence of light, so this was an absence of shadow. Elizabeth threw her arm across her face with little effect. From the swell of the light the briefest of impressions emerged. The gentlest outline of a naked man. The tall, broad shape filled the doorway, a shape she recognised instantly.
“Uriel!” she cried.
His white blond hair streamed out from his head as if a monumental hurricane was sweeping towards him, but the air she felt was still. His mouth and nostrils she could only make out as faint smudges but even in the overwhelming glare his eyes shone blue. Like fragments of sky they punctuated the catastrophic light and bore down upon her, the power they held magnified a thousandfold. Elizabeth inexplicably sank to her knees, her ears filled with the sound of a hundred seas on a hundred shores.
“Elizabeth.” His calm voice said.
“My God.” The words she’d taken in vain so many times spilled from her lips with an entirely new meaning.
“Don’t be afraid, Elizabeth.”
“The light…” She managed.
“Don’t be afraid.”
“But…why?”
“Because the son you bear will grow to become an important man.”
“My baby?” The terrible figure nodded almost imperceptibly. “Uriel…” She started.
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“It is the nature of man to love us.” But the light trembled for the briefest of moments.