The Demonologist Page 16

  Fine, I guess. Spoke to a demon in the form of a dead old woman, followed by a conversation with her twin sister’s ghost. Was the first to discover the remains of their real-life murder-suicide, then ran away without calling the authorities. Oh, and a hit man—or something like a hit man—is after me because he thinks I possess evidence incontrovertibly proving the existence of demons. Which I do.

  “Weird,” I say.

  “Was more . . . revealed to you?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Like what?”

  Like the demon I’m trying to find needs me as a witness to his influence in human affairs. He needs me as an apostle.

  “I’m not sure you’d understand,” I say.

  “Try me.”

  “I think Tess is trying to reach me as much as I’m trying to reach her.”

  “Okay. That’s good, right?”

  “Unless I can’t get to her.”

  A silence as we both weigh the meaning of this.

  “Anything else?” she asks finally.

  “I think I’ve been shown how the presence—how the Unnamed—works. It looks for a door, a way into your heart. Sadness. Grief. Jealousy. Melancholy. It finds an opening and enters.”

  “Demons afflict the weak.”

  “Or the ones who ask for help without caring who’s ready to give it.”

  “Then what?”

  “It breaks down the wall between what you can imagine doing and what you would never do.”

  “You realize you’ve just described your own situation, don’t you?”

  “How you figure that?”

  “A man in grief. Now doing something he would never normally do.”

  “Doesn’t quite apply to my case.”

  “And the distinction is—”

  “The Unnamed doesn’t want to possess me. He wants me—or at least the better part of me—to remain myself.”

  “To what end?”

  “That I don’t entirely know yet.”

  “Okay,” O’Brien says with an audible gulp of breath.

  “There’s something else.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’m right.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything. I’m even more certain that although the things happening around me are insane, I’m not insane.”

  “Delusions alone don’t make you insane.”

  “Maybe not. But I thought I was. Until now.” I take a breath. It brings the fatigue into my bones all at once, so that I plant my hand against the booth’s glass for balance. “I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go next.”

  “You’re waiting for a sign.”

  “You could at least try to hide your sarcasm.”

  “I’m not sarcastic. It’s just hard to talk about this stuff without unintentionally sounding sarcastic.”

  A pause. When O’Brien speaks next her snappy banter is replaced by her doctor voice. If she can’t make fun of me for even a full minute, I must be in worse shape than I thought.

  “You sound broken, David.”

  “I am broken.”

  “Do you think it might be a good idea to hold off on this quest thing for a while? Get some rest? Regroup?”

  “That might make sense if I had any regard whatsoever for my own well-being, but I don’t. I’m holding on to the end of a frayed string out here. And I can’t let go of it.”

  “Even if it leads you somewhere bad?”

  “It already has.”

  Outside the phone booth, cars roll in and out of the lot. All of their drivers throwing glances my way. Me, a guy in need of a shave talking on a pay phone. Only five years ago I’d appear as a harried salesman putting in a long-distance call to his wife. Now, in the age of the cell, I’m a possibly-criminal curiosity. A middle-class crackhead looking to buy. A john arranging a date. A homegrown terrorist.

  “There are things in this world most of us never see,” I find myself saying. “We’ve trained ourselves not to see them, or try to pretend we didn’t if we do. But there’s a reason why, no matter how sophisticated or primitive, every religion has demons. Some faiths may have angels, some may not. A God, gods, Jesus, prophets—the figure of ultimate authority is variable. There are many different kinds of creators. But the destroyer always takes the same essential form. Man’s progress has, from the beginning, been thwarted by testers, liars, defilers. Authors of plague, madness, despair. The demonic is the one true universal across all human religious experience.”

  “That may be true, as far as anthropological observation goes.”

  “It’s true because it’s so pervasive. Why this one shared aspect of belief for so many, for so long? Why is demonology more common than reincarnation, more than sacrificial offerings, more than the way we pray or the houses of worship where we congregate or the form the apocalypse will take at the end of time? Because demons exist. Not as an idea but here, on the ground, in the everyday world.”

  My breath catches in my throat, and I realize I’m panting like I’ve just come up for air. And the whole time O’Brien says nothing. It’s impossible to say if it’s due to the digestion of what I’ve said, or alarm at recognizing how far gone I am. There is a quality to the silence that makes it clear I’ve either won her or lost her in the last minute.

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” she says eventually.

  “Likewise. How are you feeling?”

  “Sore. A bit pukey. It’s like a hangover more than anything. A chronic hangover without the fun of the night before.”

  “I’m so sorry, Elaine.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just listen to me.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m not trying to guilt you or anything, but I don’t know how much time I’ve got. And you’re my best friend. We should be together.”

  “I know it.”

  “But you’re in Wichita.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wichita’s a long way away.”

  “I’m being a shitty friend. I’m aware of that. And you know I’d be with you if I could. But I have to—”

  “You have to do this. I accept that. I’m done with trying to convince you otherwise. I just want to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Has it occurred to you that whatever forces you’re convinced you’re up against want to isolate you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You think you’re doing the right thing by keeping me out. But it might not be doing you any favors. The distance between us—that might be part of the demon’s plan. Think about it. If it was just about making you a believer, you could do that in New York. But you’ve been led far away from home. From me.”

  “What choice do I have?”

  “Take me with you.”

  “I can’t risk you getting hurt.”

  “I’m dying, for God’s sake. Bit late for that.”

  “Elaine? Listen to me. I’m going to ask you to make me a promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “Don’t ask about coming with me again. It’s too hard for me to keep saying no. But I have to say no.”

  “My turn.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me this. What is it with men and feeling like they have to act like self-destructive superheroes whenever trouble shows up?”

  “It’s the only way we know how to love.”

  The cars come and go. It’s as true a thing to say about America as any. They reverse, they park, they join the flow. It would be a comfort of a kind if one of the cars, somewhere miles away out there in the prairie’s endless night, didn’t contain the Pursuer.

  “I should hang up now,” I say.

  “You’re not going to tell me who’s after you, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “But somebody is after you?”

  “Yep.”

  “A real person. A human being.”

  “As real and human as they come.”

  “Is he there?”


  “Not yet. But he’s coming.”

  “Then go, David. And be safe,” she says and, to my surprise, hangs up. It’s a more effective proof that she believes me than any declaration she might make.

  I get into the Mustang and drive on toward Wichita. Evening falling over the interstate with the abruptness of a pulled plug. I think of turning on the radio, but every time I do I hear something—a song, a used car commercial, a weather forecast—that reminds me of Tess.

  Hell is a night drive looking for a missing child.

  I FIND THE SCOTSMAN INN WITHOUT LOOKING FOR IT. SUITABLY without a view, without charm, without anything Scottish about it. It’s perfect.

  I pad around waiting for the Domino’s I ordered to arrive, and, after chucking all but a single slice of it into the garbage, turn the TV on and off three times, the volume dial not turning low enough to avoid the grating shrieks and sobs of prime time. I’d give sleep a try, but Delia and Paula return whenever I close my eyes. And I don’t think I can manage any more surprises from Tess’s journal. Not tonight.

  Eventually I go out to the car, pop the trunk, and grab my office copy of Paradise Lost. The paper plumped by years of penciled marginalia and lectern read-alouds. As close to a friend as I have in Kansas.

  But it’s not helping tonight. Every attempt to enter the familiar language only throws me out again, the words swimming, unmoored. It’s as though the book itself has come alive, aligned with some new purpose. As I stare at the page the poem rewrites itself, taking the letters as though they were tiles in a Scrabble game and spelling random profanities and blasphemies.

  I get up out of the chair and leave the book open on the seat. Crawl under the covers and wait for sleep to come. It doesn’t take long.

  Or perhaps I’m not asleep at all when I next look and see her.

  Tess.

  Sitting in the same chair I just vacated. My Paradise Lost held open in her hands.

  She is looking straight at me. Her mouth parted, lips forming around words I can’t hear, only read as she shapes them. Somehow it doesn’t seem that it is speech, that she isn’t attempting conversation with me. It’s why she holds the book. Though she doesn’t look down at it, she’s reading aloud from its pages.

  Tess . . .

  The sound of my voice awakens me. It also makes her go away. The book spine-up on the chair just as I’d left it.

  In the dream—if it was a dream—she looked at me. But her words came from the book in her hand.

  My copy of Paradise Lost lies open on the chair by the door in the same place I’d laid it before getting into bed. But the page is different. Someone picked it up as I slept, only to put it down on page seventy-four.

  I read the page myself and, almost instantly, come across the lines I could lip-read Tess reciting to me.

  O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams

  That bring to my remembrance from what state

  I fell . . .

  Satan’s heartfelt complaint against sunlight, one of the many comforts he turned his back on when he pursued his ambitious rebellion against God and his creations. To feel light only reminds him of what he once had. A metaphor for grief. Indeed, the case may be made—by me, now, here in Room 12 of the Scotsman Inn in Wichita, Kansas—that the entire poem is the story of Satan’s impossible rage against his own looming, unstoppable death.

  But it was Tess who chose those lines. It isn’t only Satan, but my daughter who lives in a place denied of sunlight. And it was she who, through unimaginable effort, came to my room in the night to pick up my book and speak to me in a code she hoped I might understand. Perhaps she was only doing as her captor instructed her. Perhaps it was the Unnamed assuming Tess’s form. But I don’t believe it. It hasn’t yet pretended to be Tess. Why not? It doesn’t wholly have her yet.

  Moments ago, she held the book she had tried to read and abandoned many times, trying to see what I saw in it but frustrated by the density of the words, the compressed allusions and layered meanings. But perhaps she took more away from her attempts than I’d ever given her credit for. For she read those lines without looking at the page. She knew them by heart.

  And she was here. That’s what’s important. She was here.

  But can I find her again?

  O sun.

  The sun shines everywhere over the course of the day, no matter how clearly or veiled by cloud, no matter how long the night. There must be something to shape the concept of “sun” that I’m not seeing yet. Something that carries a “where” within it.

  There is a “where” in the passage, of course. Satan falls not from heaven, but from a “state.” A condition of being, but in my case, maybe, a location. Like North Dakota.

  The sun state.

  Or Florida.

  The Sunshine State.

  It’s thin. But so were the conclusions I drew from being dropped off outside the Dakota, and that seemed to work well enough. And in any case, what else do I have to go on?

  Sleep takes me for real this time. It brings no images, only the sensation of growing heat. Thickening over my body in waves like a kind of fluid, ungraspable blanket.

  And then I’m awake.

  A sheet-kicking panic. A nightmare I can’t remember coming to its unthinkable end, the pillow spongy with a combination of perspiration and tears. It’s late. 11:24. I’ve slept through the night and then some. Though I feel less rested than flattened.

  It’s why, when there’s a single knock at the door, I open it without looking through the peep hole. Without asking who’s there.

  Whether it belongs to the living or the dead, I’m ready to hear what it wants.

  17

  COFFEE?”

  I don’t recognize her at first. The lost weight. Her skin pale as chalk. The change is so striking that, for the first second or two, I mistake O’Brien for the Thin Woman.

  “You’re here.”

  “In the sallow flesh.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “How many Scotsman Inns you think there are in Wichita?”

  “You flew out here?”

  “A bus didn’t seem the best use of time.”

  “My God! Elaine. You’re here!”

  “Yes, I am. And are you going to take this coffee or not? Because it’s burning my damn hand.”

  I take the coffee. And it burns my damn hand.

  But O’Brien is in my room. Closing the door behind her, flopping down on the bed and making a snow angel out of the damp sheets.

  “Night sweats,” she observes, sitting up. “Know them well.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “How do I look?”

  “Fine. As always.”

  “David, if I always looked like this I’d have done myself in a long time ago.”

  I sit beside her on the edge of the bed. Take her hand in mine.

  “You’re thinner,” I say.

  “And I eat, too. But there’s a greedy little monster inside me, gobbling it up. It would be almost fascinating if it wasn’t happening to me.”

  “Should you be here? Without your doctors, I mean?”

  “I’ve already told you what I think of my doctors. And I’ve brought all that modern medicine can offer me right here.” At this, she pulls a vial of pills from her jeans pocket. “Morphine. I’ll share if you’re really nice.”

  “This coffee’s fine for the moment, thanks.”

  “That coffee tastes like boiled rat turds.”

  “So that’s what it is.”

  I take another gulp. Nearly spew it back out when O’Brien starts to laugh and I join her in it. By the time we get control of ourselves again it’s a minute later and I’m wiping the coffee that’s come out of my nose, and O’Brien is showing a distressing pink in her cheeks from the wracking cough that took hold of her.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “You promised you wouldn’t come.”

  “Not true. I promised I wouldn’t ask if I could come.”

  “So you ho
pped on a red-eye—”

  “—and rode through the night to your rescue.”

  “I don’t need rescuing.”

  “That’s arguable. But you sure as hell need me.”

  There’s no debating this.

  “You know what, O’Brien? I gotta tell you. I’m scared.”

  “Of what, specifically?”

  “Losing Tess.”

  “But that’s not the only thing, is it?”

  “No, not the only thing. There are the things I’ve seen. The Unnamed I think I’m getting closer to. The guy following me.”

  “Something else, too, I bet.”

  “What?”

  “That I’m right. That you’ve misplaced your marbles. That you’re just a guy who needs serious help.”

  “Maybe. Maybe that, too.”

  “Let me worry about all of it for a little while, okay?”

  “That’s the thing. Now that you’re here, I’m worried about you, too.”

  She goes to the window. Parts the curtains a half inch and peeks out at the lot, the robin’s-egg sky.

  “Let’s get something straight,” she says when she turns to me. In the near-darkness the disease is somehow more evident than in the direct light. It reveals how much of her has already dissolved into the surrounding shadow. “You listening?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “This is the last trip I’m ever going to take. I don’t know how long I’ll last, but I can tell you this, I’m going to the very end with you. I can’t entirely say why, but this is as important to me as it is to you.”

  “I want you to live. To get well—”

  “But I’m not going to, David. And that’s okay. I just need you to know that I’m not looking for sympathy, or for somebody to wipe my brow or listen to sunshiny memories of my childhood. I’m here for my own reasons. And so the more you spend time worrying about me and not keeping your mind on the matter at hand, it’s only going to piss me off.”

  I go to her. Wrap her in my arms.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I say.

  “Gentle now. I bruise.”

  “Sorry.”

  She pulls away from me. Blows her nose.

  “We should get started,” she says.

  O’Brien starts for the door but I hold her by the elbow. The bone a smooth ball bearing held in my fingers.