The Demonologist Read online

  Exhales.

  Something comes loose within her rib cage with an audible click. The sour-milk breath from the deepest pockets of her lungs blows out at once. And with it, right at the end, a fine spray of blood. Warm dots landing on the tops of her legs, my chest, my face.

  And then she’s breathing again. Patting at my stains with the bath mat.

  “God, I’m sorry. That was awful,” she says.

  “You scared me there for a second.”

  “I scared you? I was drowning.”

  My brother. The river. My father standing in the current, transformed. Drowning. Even this single word seems intentional. But I’ve never told O’Brien about Lawrence other than that he died accidentally when I was young. If she’s drawing a connection to me, it’s coming from some other source.

  “We should go to a hospital. Get you checked out.”

  “No hospitals,” she says. “Don’t even mention hospitals again. Understand?”

  I slide back from her as she stands before the mirror and washes her face. I’m about to rise, too, when I notice the copy of Paradise Lost sidled up to the edge of the tub. Open to page eighty-seven, where Satan decides upon his plan to ruin mankind by tempting Eve with knowledge.

  Can it be sin to know,

  Can it be death?

  It’s also the same page where Live while ye may, / Yet happy pair appears. Along with a single point of O’Brien’s blood near the bottom of page eighty-six.

  In the mist that blew forth from her chest, only one part of her landed on the book. A glistening asterisk next to “Jupiter.”

  Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter

  On Juno smiles.

  “O’Brien?”

  She turns and I hand the open book up to her. I watch as her brain goes through the same interpretations mine just did.

  “You don’t use a red pen, do you?”

  “No.”

  “So that’s part of me there,” she says. “Doesn’t seem like an accident.”

  “Nothing does anymore.”

  “The Sunshine State.”

  “There’s a Jupiter in Florida.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  After the briefest pause she’s past me. Slipping into my bed and pulling the sheet up to her chin.

  “An hour’s sleep first,” she says.

  “Not sure I can sleep.”

  “Then get in here and keep me warm, for Chrissakes.”

  I hold her against me, somehow colder and bonier than she felt only moments ago. Each breath a small fight. Around me, the darkness mulling over what shape it will take next.

  I WAS WRONG ABOUT BEING UNABLE TO SLEEP.

  You have to be asleep to wake up and realize something’s changed about the room. That the bed is empty now. That the sound that wakened me was the click of the door being pushed shut from inside.

  “O’Brien?”

  I can’t see anything. Which means only that my eyes have yet to regain their focus in the dark, and not that nothing’s there.

  Because something is there.

  The hush of a leather-soled shoe pressing down on carpet. A metallic glint floating higher. Closer.

  “Don’t scream,” the Pursuer says.

  The voice even, mistakable for kindly. A doctor warning of a brief discomfort as the needle goes in.

  “It won’t make any difference,” he says, now setting a knee onto the mattress next to me.

  His face coming into semi-visibility. Perfectly calm, distracted almost, his thoughts far away. The hunting knife hanging in the air, still as the light fixture over the table behind him.

  “Please. Not yet,” I think I say, though the storm of blood in my ears makes it impossible to tell. “I’ve gotten so close.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  His back straightens. The foot still on the floor readies for the push forward as he brings the blade down.

  Yet when the knife comes, he comes with it. A heavy collapse on top of me, so that I have to wriggle out from under him.

  Once I’m standing I reach for the bedside lamp. But it’s the one on the other side that comes on first. A single 60-watt bulb revealing a collection of elements I can’t put together.

  The hair at the Pursuer’s crown seeping blood, leaving a wet halo around his head on the bedsheets.

  The hunting knife, polished and dry, lying on a pillow where it landed.

  O’Brien standing behind him, the ceramic lid of a toilet’s water tank leaned against her toothpick legs. A half moon of blood at one end.

  I meet her eyes but she doesn’t see me. She’s too occupied by lifting the heavy lid again, kicking the backs of the Pursuer’s legs wider so she can step between them, and bringing it down on his skull once more.

  Its weight brings her with it. For a long moment she lies on the Pursuer’s back as though she’d fallen asleep in the middle of giving him a massage. But then she’s sucking in air. Waving her hands until I realize I’m meant to take them.

  O’Brien lifts away and the two of us tumble against the wall and slide to the floor. We watch the body, waiting for it to move. It doesn’t.

  “Can you carry me to the car?” O’Brien asks directly into my ear.

  “Sure. Yeah.”

  The room is quiet. The yawning stillness that follows the abrupt discontinuation of noise. Yet the events of the past moments were conducted in near-silence. A violent shadow dance of whispers and shuffles and sighs.

  “David?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m thinking now.”

  19

  WE TAKE SHIFTS THROUGH THE NIGHT. ONE DOZING, THE OTHER cruise controlling, then pulling over, switching seats. We don’t talk, not at first. Warm air blown off the Gulf spritzing the windows. The tires humming in search of some forgotten melody.

  “That was him, wasn’t it?” O’Brien eventually asks.

  “Yes.”

  “He would’ve killed you.”

  “And you, too, once he was done with me.”

  “So can we have our own little trial here and now and call it self-defense?”

  “We don’t need a trial.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Okay. Case dismissed.”

  “Just promise me one thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t ask me what it felt like. Doing it.”

  “Okay.”

  But then, after an AM listener request for “Hotel California” is over, she puts her hand on my own.

  “The terrible thing is how easy it is,” she says. “You give yourself a reason, and killing is goddamned easy.”

  She laughs a squeezed laugh through “Bad Moon Rising.” Then cries for half of “Stairway to Heaven.”

  We don’t speak of it again. Which means we’ve forgiven ourselves, recognized the necessity of our actions. That, or the demon we search for is already a greater part of us than we’d like to believe.

  BY DAWN WE’RE DEEP INTO THE PANHANDLE, BREAKFASTING AT a Waffle House just outside Tallahassee. While I work through my icing-sugared French toast, O’Brien taps at my iPhone screen, searching for why Jupiter may be our intended destination.

  “So we’re looking for what, exactly?” she asks, sipping her coffee and shaking her head at the bitterness as it goes down. “Cult rituals? Babies born with claws?”

  “Nothing that obvious. Just a story that doesn’t add up.”

  “Seems like there’s more and more of those out there. Always thought it was just the freak show-ization of the Internet.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe there are more and more of them out there.”

  O’Brien reads aloud some recent news stories she’s pulled up from the east coast of central Florida, a good number of them amusingly bizarre. A cat that found its way home after being dumped at the side of the road ten miles away (“We’re absolutely keeping her now,” the owner was quoted as promising). A man who won two multimillion-dollar lottery jackpots in back-to-back weeks (“First thing? I’
m paying off my damn truck!”). A shark that munched the foot off a visiting Australian tourist (“I knew something was wrong when I hopped out of the water and people started screaming.”). But nothing that seems to bear the stamp of the Unnamed.

  “We’ll just have to sniff around once we get there,” I say. But O’Brien’s not listening to me. Absorbed by whatever she’s now reading on the phone’s screen. “Found something?”

  O’Brien finishes reading the story as I wave the waitress over for more coffee.

  “It happened just two days ago.”

  “That’s when I was in Wichita,” I say. “The day I got the O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams clue.”

  “Which means this was happening at the same time you were being drawn to it. A simultaneous connection.”

  “Are you going to give me the summary or do I have to read it myself?”

  O’Brien picks up her glass of orange juice but, scowling at the pulp on its surface, lowers it again before it reaches her lips.

  “By all accounts they were good kids,” she begins. “Which only makes it more unbelievable. Only makes it worse.”

  An elementary school on the western edge of Jupiter known for community involvement, high standardized test results, as well as its close affiliation with local church groups. Kids who mostly knew each other since preschool. Upper-middle-class sons and daughters from “the heart of God-likes-us-best America,” as O’Brien puts it.

  Third grade. Eight years old. Goofing around in the playground behind the school before dinner, after the teachers had gone home, the older kids off to wherever they spent their twilight hours. Nothing remarkable about the afternoon in any respect. But sometime between 3:40 and 4:10 when the first adult arrived on the scene, all of the kids—all seven of them—attacked one of their playmates. A boy whose name has been withheld by the police. Someone that the school’s parents and teachers and the attackers themselves attested that they liked, a boy without any racial or religious or demographic differentiation who grew up in Jupiter just like all of them. But using rocks and sycamore branches and their own fists and feet his friends spontaneously beat him into a coma.

  Animals. This word comes up a lot in the reports. “They acted like animals,” said this neighbor or that town councilor. But as a mother of one of the accused corrected, “Animals don’t do that to each other without reason.”

  Investigators have looked into the possibilities of drug use, bullying, gangs. But they have been forced to conclude that the violence was unprovoked. At least one local crank has raised the specter of toxic poisoning of some kind, a cloud of gas that visited temporary insanity on a single playground, though there is, unsurprisingly, no evidence to support such a claim. The school board psychologist attests the event is outside her experience. It’s an observation O’Brien agrees with.

  “Eight-year-olds don’t do that to other eight-year-olds,” she says, now making herself gulp down some juice to fight off the cough that scratches at her throat.

  “What about those two boys in England? The ones who murdered that toddler they lured out of a mall?”

  “That was a dynamic between two kids. And the victim was a stranger, one they viewed as the subject of their experiment. We’re talking about seven kids here—three boys and four girls—all in on it. And the victim was a friend.”

  “What are the kids saying about it?”

  “Nobody remembers much except the doing of it. As to the why, they all offer the same explanation.”

  “Which is?”

  “ ‘Toby told me to do it.’ ”

  The room spins. A greasy-spoon carousel of plasticky oranges and yellows.

  Toby. The one who came to visit Tess from the Other Place. The one who has a message for me.

  A boy who is no longer a boy.

  “Who’s Toby?” I manage after pretending to cough away something stuck in my throat.

  “Good question. Nobody knows.”

  “What do they know about him?”

  “All the kids say he was someone new in town, someone who didn’t go to their school but who showed up that afternoon and talked to them. And within ten minutes, Toby had them all convinced they ought to rip their friend apart.”

  “Are the police looking for him?”

  “Of course. But they have no leads. And do you think they will?”

  “No.”

  “Because—”

  “Because there is no Toby. Or at least no Toby anymore.”

  O’Brien and I stare at each other over the table, a silent recognition passing between us. If one of us was crazy before, we both are now.

  “Did the kids offer any descriptions of Toby?” I ask, tossing down cash to cover the bill.

  “Another odd thing. None could give sufficiently precise physical details, so the sketch artist has been unable to come up with a composite. But they were all quite sure about his voice. Coming from a kid but using grown-up words. Sounding like a grown-up.”

  “The kind of voice you can’t say no to,” I say. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one.”

  WE DRIVE ACROSS THE STATE ON I-10 TO JACKSONVILLE, FOUR LANES plumped up on piled gravel that keeps us from sinking into the swamp or tangled forest that rolls out on either side. Then south on I-95, past the countless exits to resort towns and retirement “opportunities” and Early Bird buffet deals.

  We don’t stop until Jupiter. Drive right through town until we’re stopped by the ocean, a much-advertised but long-doubted fact folding brown waves onto the sand. We park and O’Brien wordlessly steps out of the Mustang, kicks her shoes off next to the car, and starts down toward the water in a stiff gait that I watch as I sit up on the hood. The air carries a savory cologne of saltwater and seaweed and, ever present, the distant whiff of fried food.

  O’Brien starts into the water without taking off any of her clothes, without rolling up her pant legs. She just limps in like someone who has no intention of coming out. It occurs to me that I should go to her just in case she gets into trouble, snagged by the undertow or simply slipping beneath the surface. But then she stops, standing chest deep, each new wave picking her up and placing her feet back down on the bottom, the froth massaging around and past her.

  It takes her some time to make her way back to the car. Soggy in the clothes that now hang off her, so that she appears like someone who’d just swum ashore after days of clinging to a piece of wreckage.

  “That’s the last time I’ll ever feel the sea,” she says once she sits next to me.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m not being dramatic. I just listened to the water, and that’s what it told me. It was comforting, actually. A farewell between old friends.”

  I want to deny this—that this is what is happening to her as we sun ourselves after a long drive, that she is dying even now in this very moment of almost forgotten pleasure—but she is right, and now is not the time for empty comfort. And then, just as I’m about to go around to the trunk to fish out a towel stolen following the hasty, incomplete wipe-up in the previous night’s motel, O’Brien grabs hold of my wrist.

  “Chances are we’re going to fail. You know that, don’t you?”

  “It’s never far from my mind.”

  “What I’m saying is, what we’re up against—it’s stronger than us, David. It is pre-ancient, near-omniscient. And what are we?”

  “A pair of bookworms.”

  “Perfect for squashing.”

  “Is this supposed to be a pep talk? Because if it is, it’s not really working.”

  In place of laughing, O’Brien squeezes my wrist even harder.

  “I’ve been hearing a voice, too,” she says. “It started after you came back from Venice, but over the last few days on the road with you—even the last twenty-four hours—it’s become more clear.”

  “Is it—?”

  “Not the Unnamed. It’s something good, despite everything. And though I’m calling it a voice, it doesn’t speak to me. It enlightens me
. That sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s the only way to put it.”

  “So what’s it telling you?”

  “That anything can be endured if you’re not alone.”

  She kisses me on the cheek. Wipes away the wet marks she leaves on my skin.

  “The Devil—the one we’re talking to, anyway—doesn’t understand what you feel for Tess,” O’Brien says, barely more than a whisper. “It thinks it comprehends love. It’s learned all the lines, read all the poets. But it’s only mimicry. That’s our one—and very slight—advantage.”

  “That what that voice of yours told you?”

  “More or less.”

  “Did it happen to mention how we might use this one, very slight advantage?”

  “No,” O’Brien says as she slides off the front of the car to shiver in the blazing heat. “So far it hasn’t said a fucking peep about that.”

  JUPITER ELEMENTARY IS LOW-RISE, YELLOW-BRICKED, WITH THE Stars and Stripes wetly hanging from its pole in the drop-off zone (“5 MIN. LIMIT. VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED”). The very picture of American normalcy. Also, increasingly, the backdrop to TV reporters’ breathless accounts of unaccountable horror. The loner with the duffel bag. The bully victim good-bye note. The walk home abduction.

  Here, something a little different. Something that makes even less sense.

  There are a couple of local news vans parked on the street, though at first, as we pull to the curb, the cameras can’t be seen. But then the bell sounds. At the same time the doors open and children scuff out, drained by a day full of grief counselors and somber gym assemblies, the competing TV crews appear from out of nowhere, slipping past parents anxiously waiting to collect their children and wagging microphones in front of faces.

  What is the mood inside the school today?

  How are you handling what happened?

  Did you know the kids who did this?

  And the half-stricken, half-overacted replies.

  “It’s like a movie.”

  “There’s a lot of people really hurting.”

  “They were just normal kids.”