The Demonologist Read online

  We decide to stop in Opelousas for the night. The Oaks Motel offers rooms for “less than a gimlet at the Algonquin,” as O’Brien points out, so we take two with a pass-through door between them.

  Sleep isn’t possible. I know this without trying. So I open Tess’s journal again. Find another entry that proves my daughter knew so much more of the world I have entered than I could ever imagine.

  I know where bullies come from.

  There’s one in my class. Her name is Rose. Probably the most wrong name for a person in the world.

  Everyone is afraid of Rose. Even the boys. Not that she’s so tough or anything like that. If you saw a picture of her you wouldn’t think SCARY! But if she’s in the room with you, you feel it. When she looks at you, you wish she’d stop.

  (Rose is a little on the fat side. She’s getting boobs, too. The first in our class. And her nails are long and dirty, like she uses them to dig. She’s an almost-fat girl with dirty nails and boobs.)

  She never bothers me. It’s because I know why she is the way she is. I even whispered it in her ear one time.

  You think you have a secret friend but it’s not a friend

  And after I did, she gave me this look. A How could you know that? look.

  Now she leaves me alone. Like she’s the one scared of me.

  Miss Green taught a special class about bullies at the beginning of the year. She said they do bad things because they’re just scared and alone. She was only half-right.

  Bullies are scared. But they’re not alone.

  There’s a secret friend inside them. Something that starts out saying nice things, keeping them company, promising to never go.

  And then it says other things. Gives you ideas.

  That’s how I know about Rose. I can see her secret friend.

  After another couple pages I come upon another disturbing passage. Disturbing in part because of what it says about the horrors she experienced. In part because what she wrote was meant for me to read now that she’s gone.

  They are all around us.

  Open your mind to them and they’re with you. Inside you. It’s almost too easy once you do it a few times. And even if you don’t like it, it’s hard to stop.

  What do they want? To show us things. What they know, or want us to think they know. The future. How to make the world ready for them.

  They are all around us.

  I reread the passage. And again. Even before the pity, before the guilt, is the certainty that she was right. About all of it. I’ve opened my mind and closed my eyes and now I, too, have seen some of the things they want to show us. Though there is much more that hasn’t been revealed to me that had been to her. Even as we walked through Central Park to feed the ducks on the weekends, even as I read to her from The Secret Garden at bedtime, even as she kissed me good-bye and threw her bird-boned arms around my neck at the front doors of her school, she knew.

  A knock on the pass-through door. When I open it after tucking the journal out of sight, O’Brien is standing there with her tongue hanging out in a pantomime of deathly thirst.

  “Let’s get a drink,” she says.

  We walk across the street to the Brass Rail and order Budweisers before sitting at a table in the corner. The beer has no taste, but it’s fizzy and cold and performs the tongue-loosening magic of alcohol.

  “He must have been on his way to or from visiting Diane,” I begin.

  “Probably right.”

  “Maybe I should call her.”

  “You want to?”

  “No. For about eighteen different reasons, no, I don’t.”

  “Then don’t. Seems to me this isn’t the best time for insincerity.”

  “I didn’t wish the guy dead.”

  “Really?”

  “Injured, maybe. Something to wipe that smirk off his face, sure. But not dead.”

  “Well, he sure as hell’s dead now.”

  “And the first thing he does with his time on the other side is find me.”

  “Sounds like that wasn’t his decision alone.”

  “The Unnamed.”

  “It chose Will to speak to you. What did it say?”

  I don’t repeat the cruelty about O’Brien’s condition. But I once again make mental note of it. Not for its obscenity, but the fact that the Unnamed referred to O’Brien right off the top. It means we are being watched. But what’s also significant is that O’Brien may have been right about me being lured out here, far from New York, to deny me the support of my friend. In any case, for the hundredth time today, I’m grateful she took the flight out to Wichita to join me.

  “Anne spoke first, actually,” I white-lie. “Live while ye may, Yet happy pair.”

  “Don’t tell me. Milton.”

  “Who else?”

  “Why that line? Was she referring to you and Tess?”

  “No. You and me. But the tone was distinctly sarcastic.”

  “You and me,” O’Brien echoes, hugging herself.

  “It’s from Book Four. Satan has arrived in Eden and is plotting Adam and Eve’s ruin. He’s hatefully jealous of all they have—enjoyment of their bodies, the natural world, God’s favor. So he tells them to have fun while they still can, because it won’t last long. Live while ye may, / Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return, / Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed.”

  “A threat.”

  “Certainly. As well as a joke. He’s comparing us to Adam and Eve in the garden.”

  “And here we are in Louisiana. Middle-aged, one of us searching for a lost child, the other withering from a terminal disease. About as far from sinless joy as a pair can get.”

  “But there’s something in this,” I say, growing excited. “Something for us to use.”

  “What?”

  “An indication of its sensibility.”

  “A comedian.”

  “An ironist. All along, it has been citing a canonical text, a masterpiece of the poetic form, but with ironic intent. It says something of its personality.”

  “Who cares about its personality?”

  “I do. I have to.”

  O’Brien sits back in her chair and brings the bottle to her lips, surprised to find it empty. She waves it at the bartender and throws up two fingers for more. Then corrects herself by adding another two fingers.

  “Just in case,” she says.

  When the beers arrive I tell O’Brien how when I asked the Unnamed who it was it answered with another Milton quote.

  “Not to know me argues yourselves unknown.”

  “Okay, Professor,” O’Brien says. “Unpack that.”

  “It’s a Satan line again. When he’s stopped by angels guarding the earth, and they demand to know his identity. He doesn’t give them a direct answer. His pride is too great. The Devil feels they ought to know who he is for all his accomplishments, his fame, the fear he provokes.”

  “So our demon feels we should know who it is.”

  “It’s more that he wants me to figure that out.”

  “Another test.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Why does it need you to puzzle out its name?”

  “I’ve wondered that, too. And I think it has to do with intimacy. If I am able to speak its name, it brings the two of us closer. And it needs us to be very close.” Not friends, perhaps, I recall again its dead voice predicting from Tess’s throat. No, certainly not friends. But unquestionably close.

  “Maybe it can’t be the first to say its name,” O’Brien offers, slamming her beer down. “It needs you to say it, to give him greater authority. Anonymity is one of the demonic drawbacks. It denies them a degree of power. Think about it. ‘My name is Legion.’ Satan not introducing himself at Eden’s gates.”

  “The exorcist’s first step is to discover the name.”

  “Exactly! Names have power, and it can go both ways. In the case of demons—our demon—it doesn’t say who it is because it’s not able to. But if you are able to determine its n
ame and say it aloud, it opens a channel for it somehow. Through you.”

  O’Brien puts her hand over mine. Her blood pulsing so strongly through her papery skin I can feel each beat.

  “I think you may be right,” I say. “Except I would go a step further.”

  “Step away.”

  “Not to know me argues yourselves unknown. It’s a two-way street. We will be united only once I discover who it is and who I am.”

  “The line says ‘yourselves,’ David. Plural. I think I’m part of this self-discovery, too.”

  We drink some more. Start into our “just in case” third beers.

  “So here’s the million-dollar question,” O’Brien says, wiping the sudden sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. “What’s the Unnamed’s name?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But I think it’s one of the Stygian Council who sit in Milton’s version of Pandemonium.”

  “Definitely not Satan?”

  “No. Though it covets its master’s fame.”

  “Ambitious. Add that to its characteristics.”

  “And literary-minded. Using Paradise Lost as a kind of codebook.”

  “Language. It shares a passion for words with you, David.”

  “Seems that way,” I admit. “And it seems like it would like to have a talk with me as much as I would with it.”

  O’Brien abruptly opens her mouth wide in a sudden yawn.

  Even here, in a roadhouse lit only by neon beer signs and old pinball machines, O’Brien’s illness is plainly drawn over her features. For stretches of time her humor and animation disguise the ongoing damage being done within her, and then, all at once, it pushes through to show itself. It’s like the Unnamed doing his face-morphing trick with Will Junger in the truck, or the man in Venice becoming my father. Cancer is a kind of possession, too. And like a demon, before it claims you, it nibbles away at who you are, erases the face you have always presented to the world to show the unwanted thing inside.

  “Let’s get you to bed,” I say, rising and offering O’Brien my hand.

  “I might think you were coming on to me if you didn’t have that worried-little-boy look on your face.”

  “I am a worried little boy.”

  “Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way,” she says, standing but leaving my hand untouched. “You all are.”

  WE RETURN TO THE MOTEL, BUT WHEN I GET TO MY DOOR O’BRIEN stands right behind me. I turn to face her and she pockets the key to her room.

  “Is it okay if I stay with you tonight?”

  “Sure,” I say. “But there’s only one bed in there.”

  “That’s kind of why I’m asking.”

  Inside, she slips out of her jeans and sweater so that, in the single lamp’s light, she stands in only a T-shirt and underwear. I don’t mean to stare, but I do. Her lost weight confirmed by the bones nudging against her skin, replacing curved lines with knobs and ridges. But she is still beautiful despite this, still an elegant woman capable of invitation with her poise, the promises of her body’s shape. Perhaps tomorrow the disease will steal this, too. But not yet. Tonight, she is a woman my eyes linger on with desire more than pity.

  “I must look awful,” she says. But she doesn’t cover herself, doesn’t hide beneath the sheets.

  “On the contrary.”

  “Really? I’m not hideous?”

  “I think you’re lovely.”

  “Then make love to me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I might not be able to tomorrow. You might not want to,” she says, as though reading my mind’s assessment of a moment ago.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Think about what we’re after out here, David. What’s after us. If we’re anything at all, it’s two people who have left being sure of things behind.”

  “Elaine—”

  “Don’t think about it. Don’t Elaine me. Just come here.”

  She opens her arms and then I’m in them. Kissing her cheek. Holding her against me in an embrace she pushes away from because it’s too much like what we’ve done before, the tender but polite contact with which we would conclude our evenings out in New York. She wants this to be different. So she unbuckles my belt, pops the button. Slides her hand down.

  “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay. That’s good.”

  She clicks off the light and pulls me down onto the bed. Taking off my clothes more expertly than I could manage it myself. Then it’s my turn.

  Her skin cool and tasting of grass and, more faintly, lemon zest. She is a woman I know so well and yet now, instantly, not at all. A thrilling stranger. A tumbling discovery of new gestures, new ways of pleasing and being pleased.

  She directs me onto my back and straddles my thighs, working her way up, stroking me with both her hands. Readying me.

  All along we have been so close that there has been nothing to see but O’Brien’s eyes, her face, her body. But now that she is sitting up, the room is partly visible again.

  And there is something here that wasn’t here before.

  A darker shade of black than the rest of the room’s shadow that surrounds O’Brien like an aura. Yet, without any light except whatever trickles in through the curtains and under the door, she could not possibly cast any shade herself. It’s not a shadow, then, but something made of shadow. Standing at the foot of the bed directly behind her.

  As she rises, it moves. Takes a single sideways step to show the profile of its face. A man looking down at something a short distance off, transfixed. Unmoving except for the recent exertions of his trembling arms. He could be calculating a loss, he could be awaiting further direction. The whites of his eyes casting their own dim illumination, revealing the water dripping off his chin, his matted hair. The mouth and nose recognizable, in their handed-down shape, as my own.

  Dad?

  I don’t say this aloud. But I hear it. My voice at six years old, uttering the same word—spoken with the same immeasurable puzzlement—I did the day Lawrence drowned. My father, too late to save him, standing in the water just as he stands waist-deep in shadow in this room.

  “David?”

  O’Brien kneeling over me, her breath now slowed. Her look of concern becoming something else as she sees my own expression change. The horror I felt as a child when my father turned to me on the day my brother died and I saw a stranger.

  Just as that stranger turns to me now.

  NO!

  I push O’Brien off me and she lands on her side, gripping the fitted sheet to stop her from falling over the edge.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Do you see him?” I ask, eyes closed but pointing to where my father stood.

  “See who?” O’Brien flicks on the bedside lamp. “There’s nobody there.”

  “My father was here,” I tell her after opening my eyes to confirm he’s gone.

  “It’s okay. We’re safe now.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  O’Brien puts her T-shirt back on. Stands in the same place my father stood a moment ago.

  “Toss me that, would you?” she asks, pointing to my Paradise Lost on the table. I throw it to her and, as it flies, the pages flap like panicked wings. Even when she catches it the book seems agitated in her hands, the cover flapping open every moment it’s not pressed shut, so that it appears like a mouth gasping for air.

  O’Brien heads into the bathroom. As she goes she reaches her hand out against the wall for balance.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine,” she says, not sounding fine. “Just need to pee.”

  “And you’re taking that with you for some light reading?”

  “Want to see what all the hype’s about.”

  She swings the door closed behind her. Before it closes, I catch a glimpse of her in the mirror. I’m expecting to see disappointment at our failure. My failure. Or maybe frustration at where we’ve found ourselves, how she’s let herself be talked into a situation that, if it
wasn’t me, and if her days weren’t so sparsely numbered, she would have avoided. Instead, I see that she is scared. She doesn’t need to go to the bathroom. It is her fear she doesn’t want me to see.

  Almost right away I hear her crying. I’ve never known O’Brien to make such sounds, and it takes a moment to confirm this is what she’s doing. Snuffling gasps and little chokes like a drowning swimmer pulled from the water.

  “How you doing in there?” I ask when I go to stand outside the door.

  “Look at me. I’m like a girl who’s lost her virginity at a rec-room party.”

  “Technically, we didn’t do it.”

  “And technically I’m not a virgin.”

  “Ah. An analogy, then.”

  “Thought you might be familiar with those.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “You bringing your dad with you?”

  “Not as far as I can tell.”

  “Then sure.”

  O’Brien sits on the toilet but with the lid down. Paradise Lost laid open on her lap, her hands wiping at her cheeks and nose with starchy tissues. In the past three minutes she has aged twenty years. And yet, at the same time, she sits in the knee-to-knee, pigeon-toed posture of a child.

  “I’m sorry about that in there,” I say. “I was enjoying myself.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Seems like our friend doesn’t want us to have any fun.”

  “That, or you’ve got some serious sexual guilt issues.”

  She coughs out a laugh. And keeps coughing. One hand gripped to the countertop and the other against the wall, holding her body up as it heaves against some new obstruction in her chest. In only a couple of seconds, her skin colors. Not pink, but blue.

  I fall to my knees and get close to her, unsure how to help. The Heimlich? Mouth-to-mouth? Neither seems right.

  All at once, O’Brien stops coughing. Stops breathing. Eyes wild, pleading. Her hand brought to my face so hard it almost knocks me onto my back.

  She pulls in the little air she can in a long draw, forcing herself to be calm. It takes a long time. A sudden quiet except for the book that drops, flopped open, to the floor. Both hands braced against my shoulders.