The Demonologist Page 20

  As we cross the street and join the milling crowd, I start toward a girl who looks to be around eight or nine. I bend down in the baseball catcher’s crouch that’s meant to signal a friendly grown-up, the posture of the understanding cop. And she responds as if trained to. Walks right up to me like I’ve flashed a badge.

  “My name’s Officer Ullman,” I say. “Just wanted to ask you a question or two.”

  She glances up at O’Brien, who smiles down at her.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Did you know those kids who beat up on that classmate of theirs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you remind me of the name of the injured child?”

  “Remind you?”

  “Yes,” I say, slapping at my pockets in a pantomime of a misplaced notepad. “My memory’s not what it used to be.”

  “Kevin.”

  “Kevin what, sweetheart?”

  “Lilley.”

  “Right! Now, do you remember those kids in your class who hurt Kevin? Do you recall them talking about a boy named Toby?”

  The girl links her hands together and holds them over her waist. A gesture of shame. “Everybody talked to Toby,” she says.

  “What was he like?”

  “The same as us. But different.”

  “Different how?”

  “He didn’t belong to anybody. He didn’t go to school. He did what he wanted.”

  “Anything else?”

  She thinks about this. “He smelled a little funny.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “Like something in the ground.”

  Her nostrils flare at the odor’s recollection.

  “Did he tell you things?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Bad things?”

  She squints. “No. But they made you feel bad.”

  “Can you remember one thing he would say to you?”

  “Not really,” she answers, her arms rigid with the effort to summon specific words to mind. “It’s like he didn’t talk. Or like it was you talking to yourself.”

  The girl looks up at O’Brien again. Starts to cry.

  “Hey now. It’s all right,” I say, reaching out to the girl to hold her up. “It isn’t—”

  “Don’t touch her!”

  I turn to see a man striding across the school’s lawn. A big, pissed-off guy in an XXXL Miami Dolphins shirt. The turquoise fabric billowing under his swinging arms.

  “There’s no need—” O’Brien starts, but leaves the sentence unfinished. How could it end? There’s no need to kick my friend’s jaw off.

  The girl runs to her father. When he stops to pick her up, he looms over me. By now, some of the other parents and kids are looking our way, even inching closer to get a better look.

  “Who are you?” he asks me.

  “Reporters.”

  “With who?”

  “The Herald,” O’Brien offers.

  The father turns to her, then back to me. “I already spoke to the guy from the Herald,” he says. “Which makes you two a pair of dirty liars.”

  We don’t argue with him on that. O’Brien is in no condition to prevent what’s about to happen next, and I can think of no way of getting to my feet and out of range of his feet or fists fast enough to avoid their blows. The three of us paused in mutual acceptance of the inevitable.

  And it’s in this moment that I see I was wrong about the point of the man’s rage. He’s not angry at us for speaking to his kid. He’s not, in fact, angry at all. He’s scared shitless by what his daughter told him about Toby, the boy who doesn’t exist. The boy who told her and her classmates to dream up the most awful thing they could do and then do it for real.

  “My daughter is missing,” I say to the man, low enough that only he and his child can hear. It holds him even more still than he was. “I’m looking for my little girl.”

  Something in his face shows that he not only believes me, but that he understands my search has something to do with Toby and the playground beating and the things he doesn’t understand that have come crashing into his formerly not-too-bad Floridian world. He gets it without remotely comprehending it. Which is why he pulls his daughter even closer against his chest and steps away.

  It allows me to start back toward the Mustang with O’Brien a half step behind me. The faces of the parents and kids and hairsprayed reporters absorbing our retreat with the gratitude of those who know that, no matter how lousy things are for us, it’s not as bad as it is for them.

  MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE O’BRIEN LOOKS MORE LIKE A PATIENT THAN most of the patients, but it turns out to be easy to walk up to the main-floor nurses’ station of the Jupiter Medical Center, ask for Kevin Lilley’s confidential room number, offer assurances that we’re blood relations, and be given directions to the bed of central Florida’s most famous ICU resident.

  From there, it’s up to the third floor, the two of us wondering on the elevator ride what we expect to find out from a kid in a coma.

  “A mark, maybe,” O’Brien suggests.

  “Like 666? A pentagram?”

  “I don’t know, David. You’re the one who brought us here. What are you looking for?”

  Another sign. The last one.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” I say.

  Our luck continues when we reach Kevin’s room to find him without the hand-holding parents or hovering visitors I’d expected. A nurse changing his IV explains they’d all headed home for the night only moments ago.

  “You’re not with them?” she asks.

  “We’re up from Lauderdale,” O’Brien says, as though this answers everything anyone could ever want to know about us.

  A moment later we’re left alone with Kevin and his assembled machines, beeping and puffing. A kid so swollen and discolored he looks like he’s wearing a second skin, one he’s grown out of and will soon shed completely, revealing the new kid beneath. His head is the most worrying aspect. The skull wrapped in complicated caps and gauze, protecting his brain from contact at the places where the bone has been torn away. But it’s his eyelids that are the hardest to look at. Thick and shiny as linoleum.

  “Kevin?”

  O’Brien surprises me by addressing the boy first. The whole way over she felt it was of little use coming here, and she might be right. But her pity for the child triggers an attempt at contact. Reaching out to him in a place as distant and unknowable as wherever Tess is.

  The machines beep. Kevin breathes, the tubes in his nostrils sucked at like straws in an empty glass. But he doesn’t hear.

  “Why?” O’Brien whispers, wiping at her cheeks.

  To prove that they’re with us. That they’ve always been with us.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “We were brought here to see this?”

  The corruption of man. Their greatest achievement. A masterpiece-in-progress.

  “I don’t know.”

  O’Brien goes to look out the window. The late afternoon clouds collecting like confused thoughts on the ocean horizon. In a few hours the evening will come, the hospital overseen by the overnight skeleton crew. And Kevin will be here, alone with the cluster of Get Well Soon cards on the night table and a bouquet of flaccid balloons on the sill.

  “You don’t know me,” I whisper to him, stepping around the side of the bed. “But Toby has spoken to me, too.”

  Some part of me—the foolish part, growing bolder in its childish, magical thinking—expects this to elicit a signal from the boy. That because this quest the Unnamed has set me on has me at its center, I am the key to every lock. But the truth is everyone loses someone they think they can’t live without. All of us have a moment like this, when we believe our heavenward plea, our dark incantation, will trigger a miracle.

  “Kevin? I’m the man that Toby has mentioned to you,” I say, bending close to his ear, the skin smelling of disinfectant. “I have a little girl, not much older than you. Something bad happened to her, too. It’s wh
y I’ve come here from so far away to see you.”

  Nothing. Maybe even less than nothing. His breathing sounds more shallow here, so close to him. His connection to life an even quieter thing than it first appeared.

  Then I touch him.

  Place my hand over his and lift it up an inch. Hold it without squeezing. Lend his forearm the simple animation it’s unlikely to ever perform on its own again.

  But when I stop moving, the hand doesn’t.

  A finger. The index, extending half-straight to point at me.

  I bend closer. My ear almost touching his lips. Close enough to hear Kevin’s voice. So quiet only someone who had already long memorized the lines could hear them for what they are.

  Even as he forms the words—tentative, a struggle to remember the precise sequence—I realize that Kevin has memorized them, too. It’s something that Toby has asked of him and, to keep his hope of swimming up to the light alive, he is being the best student he can be.

  A dungeon horrible, on all sides round

  As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames

  No light, but rather darkness visible

  His nose sucks at the tubes with a slightly stronger pull for a minute, a near-silent recovery from his efforts. Then he is asleep-but-not-asleep again.

  O’Brien touches my shoulder. When I stand straight I see that she hasn’t heard what I’ve heard.

  “We should go,” she says.

  She starts for the door but I linger. Return to the bedside and whisper words from a different book into Kevin’s ear.

  Though a host encamp against me,

  my heart shall not fear.

  20

  AFTER LEAVING THE HOSPITAL, O’BRIEN JUST TAKES THE WHEEL and we roll through the palm-lined streets of Jupiter, a world of convenient parking and jumbo signage. Few walk the streets. I try to catch someone getting into or out of their car, but never do. The traffic is the only living thing in evidence. Slowpoke seniors steering the last of Detroit’s cruisers, looking for a deal, for something to do. Their human expressions reduced to the lame jokes of personalized license plates.

  “I’m tired,” O’Brien announces. She looks it. A tired more than tired, bone-deep. I look at her and realize that it is the new view she has of the world that draws the color from her skin even more than her illness.

  “Let’s go back to the motel,” I say. “You should rest.”

  “There isn’t time.”

  “Just lie down for half an hour. It’ll be okay.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Keep driving around.”

  After I drop O’Brien off I head straight for a destination I didn’t have in mind. The playground. The place where seven children spilled the blood of another upon swing-set sand.

  There’s nobody here. It’s the teeth-brushing hour. My favorite part of the day with Tess. The ritual of bath, pajamas, and book. A succession of comforts I could reliably deliver night after night. Through nothing more than these simple repetitions, I could make things better.

  Not tonight. Wherever she is now lies beyond my reach. Beyond hearing of a whispered “Once upon a time . . . ” or You are my sunshine.

  Yet I sing for her anyway. Sit on one of the swings and fight to stay in tune. A broken lullabye in the twilight.

  You make me happy when skies are gray . . .

  A boy walking over the grass.

  He is the same age as Kevin Lilley and his classmates. A good-looking kid in need of a haircut and wearing a junior-sized Rolling Stones T-shirt, the one with the big lips and tongue on a black background. Moving uncertainly, stiffly, as though recently risen after a long sleep in an uncomfortable position.

  The boy sits on the swing next to mine. Looks down at his feet. It could almost be that he hasn’t noticed I’m here.

  “You’re Toby,” I say.

  “I was.”

  “But you’re dead now.”

  This seems to confuse him. Then, when he figures something out, his expression turns to one of piercing sorrow before he recovers, merely hopeless.

  “I belong to him,” he says.

  “Who is he?”

  “He doesn’t have a name.”

  “Is there a girl with you, where you are?” I ask. “A girl named Tess?”

  “There’s a lot of us.”

  “That’s what he’s told you to say. You know more than that, though, don’t you? Tell me the truth.”

  He shifts around, wincing, as though he’d swallowed a steak knife and is trying in vain to find the least agonizing position to sit in.

  “Tess,” he says. “Yes. I’ve talked to her.”

  “She’s where you are?”

  “No. But she’s . . . close.”

  “Can you find her now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s not meant to be found.”

  I pinch my eyes. Drag a wet sleeve over my face.

  “What happened to you, Toby?” I ask him. “When you were alive.”

  He kicks at the sand with the toes of his shoes.

  “There was a man who hurt me,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “A friend . . . who wasn’t a friend.”

  “A grown-up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hurt you how?”

  “With his . . . hands. The things he did. The things he said he’d do if I told.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I had to make it stop, that’s all. My mom had these pills. I had to make it stop.”

  He looks at me. Just a boy. Unspeakably afraid, broken before he had a chance to be whole.

  Then, all at once, Toby’s face goes slack. Without any other physical alteration, without the morphing I’d seen in the faces of others the Unnamed had taken possession of, the Toby part of the boy drains away, and there is only a shell. A once-human boy sitting on a swing, lifeless in a way beyond death.

  Then it moves again.

  The eyes swing up to fix on mine. When it speaks, it’s with the voice I know so well now it’s like a part of me, emanating from inside my own head as they say fillings can pick up radio frequencies in your teeth.

  “Hello, David,” it says.

  “I know who you are.”

  “But do you know my name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Say it yourself.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be a test, would it?”

  “You don’t say it because you can’t.”

  “It would be an error to presume to know what I can and cannot do.”

  “You need me to know you.”

  “Really? Why would that be?”

  “For me to speak your name would lend you the substance of identity, however shallow. So when you are given a name, you might pretend to be more fully human.”

  The boy scowls at this. And though it is the expression of a petulant child, a look almost laughable in any other context, it is enough, from this boy, to race the heart.

  “Tess is crying, David,” it says. “Can’t you hear her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s stopped believing you will ever come. Which means she will belong to me by the moon—”

  “No!”

  “SAY MY NAME!”

  This time, the voice reveals the hatred that is its true character. The words passing through Toby’s cracked lips in white bubbles of saliva.

  “Belial.”

  This is me. The demon’s name escapes my lips and flies out into the air like some winged creature that has been hiding within me, and now, in haste, it is returning to its keeper.

  “I’m so pleased,” the boy says. And it is pleased, the voice returned to what it was. A vacant smile pulling his mouth wide as though by invisible hooks. “When did you make your determination?”

  “I think a part of me has known since I heard you speak through Tess in Venice. It’s taken me this long to confirm it. Accept it.”

/>   “Intuition.”

  “No. It was your arrogance. Your pretensions of civility. A bogus sophistication.”

  The boy smiles again. Not in pleasure this time.

  “That is all?”

  “And your rhetoric,” I continue. Unable to stop wanting to hold its attention. “You were the Stygian Council’s great persuader.

  On the other side up rose

  Belial, in act more graceful and humane;

  A fairer person lost not heaven; he seemed

  For dignity composed and high exploit:

  But all was false and hollow.

  The elegant voice that calmed Moloch’s raging call to arms, argued to wait until God’s anger soothed before mounting a surprise attack on heaven. Our supreme foe in time may much remit / His anger, and perhaps thus far removed / Not mind us not offending. Lover of fame and empty erudition. Yet he pleased the ear . . . his thoughts were low. That is the meaning of your name, after all. Belial. Without worth.”

  The boy’s face is fixed again. Unchanging, unmoving. Though his feet push against the dusty earth beneath the swing. A slow back and forth, forcing me to turn my head to follow him. A dizzying pendulum.

  “You and John have much in common,” it says.

  “I’ve studied Milton’s work. That’s all.”

  “Haven’t you ever asked why you have been so drawn to it?”

  “All art is worthy of study.”

  “But it is so much more than that! He is the author of history’s most eloquent record of dissent. Rebellion! That is why, in his verse, John presents such a sympathetic case for my master. He is on our side, however secretly, unconsciously. Just as you are.”

  “You’re wrong. I have never done harm to anyone.”

  “It’s not about harm, David. Violence, crimes—these are the detritus of evil, minor matters compared to those of the spirit. And what you and John share is the spirit of resistance.”

  “Resistance to what?”

  The boy doesn’t answer. Swings back and forth without pumping his legs, without touching the ground, without moving his eyes from mine. The chains creaking in a repetition of an identically inflicted hurt.

  “All your adult life you have studied religion, Christianity, the works of the apostles—and yet you do not believe in God,” it carries on after a time, then pauses.