Archangel

The Archangel was broadcasting from Chicago tonight. Danny Constantine had set up his view camera and strung an aerial wire from the windshield of his Ford to a section of rusted out chain-link fence and he had been listening to her program, beamed from the deserted Blackstone Hotel in the heart of that dead, cold city, as she put it, for three hours, until his B batteries had gone dead. He cursed himself for not having charged the batteries before coming out tonight, because he loved the sound of the Archangel's voice, and loved the things she said. She was a wise guy and a cynic, but she was sweet, too, and she told the truth about the way things really were: here in Milltown, Minnesota, and now down in Chi, too.

Danny took down the aerial, checked his travel alarm clock, got back in the car, pushed the seat back as far as it would go, and sat with his feet up on the dash. Rising above him were the flour mills that had built Milltown. Danny's Ford was parked on a rail siding that lay between the mills and the river. There was a wall of them that ran for four city blocks, each mill six or seven stories tall, built of limestone or whitewashed brick that seemed to glow in the pale moonlight. They had been built that way purposefully, one against the other so that they hid the river, and the falls that powered them, from the rest of the city. The flour barons who had ground wheat into money at the turn of the century were jealous of the source of their power. On the downtown side of First Street they had built a power canal that diverted the river and fed the wheel pits and turbines that powered all the machinery on the work floors of the mills. They had covered this canal with a rail trestle. Water still ran through the canal, but above it, the rails were orange with rust, and milkweed plants poked through the cinders and grew high between the cracked ties.

Once, that canal and the river had meant everything to the city; the mills worked twenty-four hours a day. Now, in the summer of 1930, all of them stood dark and abandoned. In the middle of this miller's row stood the ruins of what had been the largest flour mill in the world: the Crockett A mill. Two years ago last January, Crockett A had exploded and burned, launching a pillar of fire fueled by flour dust, and the timbers and floors inside the limestone shell, that shone like a candle for fifty miles around the frozen prairie. It had been fifteen degrees below zero that night, and when morning came and the fire brigade had given up, the walls of the Crockett A were clad with fantastic blue-white stalactites of ice that glittered in the weak sunshine, warmed, and fell off to shatter at the base of the wall.