Angel Kidnap

He was up there with the angels. He was visible, should they choose to look up, hanging around amongst the clouds, handcuffed by ectoplasm to invisible celestial guardians. Captive and floating. Serve him right.

This is what he'd done. Listen up: I shan't say it twice.

He'd had his mindstream perma-ghosted between his naming and his death, the poor sucker, some foreign party-pooper deposited in the crystals of his braingut so he gradually succumbed to its powdery malice. This is what happens all the time, unfortunately. But you know that, of course.

Angel Kidnap was his name, not his modus operandi. If you're bequeathing your kid the surname "Kidnap", you tend to want to compensate by giving him the best start in life, so they named him "Angel." And he was a little angel. At first. But angels can fall. And he fell. First downwards then upwards. He never saw the wagon. Fifteen years old. Too busy sauntering. The vertical movement down the road took out the horizontal one across it no problem. Warp one, weft nil. Head-squash-pulp. Instant release to purgatory. Strings pulled. Instant release from purgatory.

No matter. No sweat. His soul stretched to a point where it qualified for expulsion instantly and then instantly transported to the pain-wire factory, then forced out across the crush-wheel until it became even thinner: so thin it was invisible to all but the real angels. And then his soul not so much escaped as sidled out and fell upwards, like angel feathers in a rising draught.

But his soul was still a soul invaded by another soul, and that's when the trouble started. His soul became web-sticky, and it spidered out and started to snare things drifting up past it: people's prayers, mostly. Caught and annexed. Trapped in the web of a twice-perverted soul who disgraced and twisted their earnest supplications and turned them to vile imprecations that cursed the god and spouted support for evil rebellion before they were allowed on their way, so that the god always received them with their malice attached. And the prayers, always rejected by the god, always fell like screwed-up petitions back to the ground.

That is when the angel-police decided to act. The arrest of a soul. Rare, but occasionally necessary. They were trained for it. And that training was regularly refreshed. Changed circumstances, new knowledge, disinterred dangers.

This is what happened. Seething wing-squadrons of clumped-together angel-hair almost-presences appeared unobserved, and strong-armed his spread-out soul and gaped slashes into it so that the prayers could escape through. Unlike unpossessed souls, his soul couldn't bleed, but it could leak. It leaked wickedness to the planet, and hence became even lighter. It floated closer to the god.

The god had no jurisdiction over the planet: only over the prayers of its inhabitants. The god had no power over errant souls, either. But the god did have resistance, so was unpolluted by the malevolent stickiness of the escaped soul and the god kept the soul at an unharmed length.

However, the planet was polluted by his dropped malice and its prayers were perverted at
source. The god received no further sincerity. If the god had a thirst for honesty, it was not assuaged. The inhabitants of the planet had no more to give. The haunted ghost had haunted their prayers. The proliferation had commenced. The god started to desiccate. The angel-guardians started to weaken and drift away. The planet started to burn.