The Demonologist Page 21

No, more than a pause. An opening gap in time. A falling away.

  A moment ago the two of us sat on canvas swing seats in a suburban Florida playground. Now, as I raise my eyes, I see that while we remain on the swings, immediately beyond our small square of sand is forest. The trees barren, standing too close to each other, starving for lack of water to be drawn from the ash-powdered earth. I try to peer through the trunks but there are only more bent trees, the ground flat and without end. It is a vision of the woods on the far side of the river my brother and I feared as children. Untouched by air or birdsong or any voice but the boy’s, whispering from scripture in my head.

  And the Lord said unto Satan, “Whence comest thou?”

  I can’t see it, but I know that something watches from the trees. A density so great it bends the air, a kind of sideways gravity that pulls and distends everything around it. It communicates nothing in its swelling silence but want, timeless and insatiable. This is the territory it wanders, on and on. Ravenous with grief.

  Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”

  My eyes return to the playground’s sand. Try to hold them there. Let nothing in but the boy’s words, now spoken aloud.

  “Why not?” it says, carrying on as though I had stopped time and now switched it back on. “Because you cannot accept the notion of his absolute goodness! You have suffered too much, in your way—in your melancholy—to serve unquestioningly before an ever-loving, ever-tyrannical Lord. His goodness is another name for Authority, a written command from an absent father. Your critical mind gives you no choice but to see this. And in this, you remind me of John.”

  The boy looks skyward. At first I’m grateful to have his eyes off me. But then he speaks in another’s voice—his true voice, a wet and hateful hiss—and I know that this, not his stare, is what I will never forget. This voice, quoting the poet, will be the narrator for what remains of the nightmares of my life.

  To do aught good never will be our task,

  But ever to do ill our sole delight,

  As being the contrary to his high will

  Whom we resist.

  When it’s done, the boy looks at me again. The voice once again the one he’s chosen to speak to me with.

  “Brave resistance. It’s what binds us, David.”

  “I am not with you.”

  “But you are!” The boy jumps in before my last word is out. “You have always known it. John was with us from the beginning, just as you have been.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Is it? His best friend from childhood dies at sea. His first wife leaves him soon after marriage. Suspended from Cambridge for arguing with his tutor. A stay in prison for his dissenting views. He was, like you and I—like my master, his most magnificently drawn hero—resistant to servitude. A rebel, sensitive to all the losses and unfairness of his life. Paradise Lost is the most wonderful misrepresentation, don’t you think? Purporting to justify the ways of God to men, but in fact a justification for independence, for freedom. It was, for its time, the finest piece of what one may call demonic propaganda. My masterpiece.”

  “Your masterpiece?”

  “Every poet has his muse. And I was John’s. Or even something more than that. I gave the words to him. He merely signed his name to them.”

  “Your arrogance has made you blind.”

  “Blind! John was blind when he wrote his poem! Have you forgotten? That’s when he asked for help. He begged the darkness enclosing upon him for inspiration. And I came! Yes! I came and whispered my sweet nothings in his ear.”

  The Devil lies, David.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Don’t be crude, Professor. Profanity is one contest you will not win with me.”

  At the edge of the swing set’s square of sand, a pair of seagulls fight over what looks at first to be a pile of chicken bones. The little rib cage, the little skull. Not there before. Not chicken bones.

  The birds pecking out each other’s eyes, biting the backs of each other’s necks, pulling and ripping at feathers, at flesh. The trees crowding closer to see the first spits of blood.

  Toby raises his hand and brushes the air. The seagulls flap away. Their screeches joined by others from within the forest.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the boy says. “If I was the voice in John’s ear, why would he depict us so unfavorably? You know the answer, Professor. He was limited by his times. To praise Satan and his fallen angels outright would have been illegal, impossible. So he named us the antagonists of the poem while clearly standing with us in his sympathies. Answer me this: Who is the real hero of the poem? God? Adam?”

  “Satan.”

  “As you have repeatedly and passionately argued yourself, in your admirable essays.”

  “An academic argument only.”

  “You don’t believe that! Why else devote your life to this position? Why bother convincing your colleagues and indoctrinating your students in what, in John’s time, would be called blasphemy? It is because you stand with us, David. And you are far from alone.”

  His speech—the snaking logic of his rhetoric—is so disorienting I keep glancing down to make sure my feet remain on the ground, holding me in place. But what is “ground” here? What is “remain”? I’ve only to look at the boy again and the sensation of movement returns. A dry-land seasickness.

  “Why Tess?” I say with a dry swallow. “Why me?”

  “I keep her with me to give you focus. Every poet—every storyteller—requires motivation.”

  “That’s how you see me?”

  “What you call the document is proof of our existence. But you, David, are my messenger. And the message is your testimony. All you’ve seen, all you’ve felt.”

  It’s not me swinging that makes me feel so dizzy. It’s the whole world, the withered garden, spinning.

  “Will you let me see her? Talk to her?”

  “This is not yet the end of your journey, David.”

  “So tell me where to go.”

  “You already know.”

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “Leave the woman behind. Complete your wandering.”

  “For wanderers eventually find their way to you.”

  “It is not surrender I seek! I am not your enslaver but your liberator. Don’t you see? I am your muse as much as I was John’s.”

  Part of me knows there is weakness in his argument. But I can gain no traction on the substance of what he says, as though a food I have ingested now sits, heavy and unnourishing, in my gut. It leaves me no choice but to keep speaking, keep asking. Try not to think of the hungry thing in the woods that, without looking up, I know has stepped out to show itself. Moving closer.

  “Propaganda,” I say. “That is how you see the document, isn’t it? How you see me. I can help you make a case where you cannot make it yourself.”

  “The war on heaven has never been waged in hell, nor on Earth. The battleground lies within every human mind.”

  “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

  “John saw that. As did the other John.”

  “The Book of Revelation.”

  “A book not to be taken too literally.”

  “What is your interpretation?”

  “The Antichrist will come bearing weapons of persuasion, not destruction,” the boy says, growing louder, firmer. “The Beast will rise not from the sea, but within you. Each of you, one at a time. And in a manner suited to your own misgivings, frustrations. Your grief.”

  “You’re waging a campaign.”

  “A crusade!”

  The boy opens his mouth as though to laugh, but nothing comes out. It is a skill the original Toby would have possessed, but that the one who occupies his body now has never known.

  “Revelation is a vision of the future of man,” I say, reasoning on the fly. “But Matthew offers a vision of your future.
What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us before the time? Your crusade will fail. It is foretold. The time. You are destined to die in the lake of fire.”

  The boy blinks at this. And then, a sudden darkening under his eyes, as though he might weep. For the first time, he looks like an actual boy.

  “There is so much to do before that,” it says.

  “But it will happen. You don’t deny that.”

  “Who can deny the will of the Heavenly Father?” the boy spits.

  “You will lose.”

  “I will die! It is what I have in common with you, with all humankind. We all bear the knowledge of our own deaths. But God? Of course he goes on! Eternal. Indifferent. Pure goodness is cold, David. It’s why I embrace death. Embrace you.”

  For an awful moment I fear he is about to pull me against him. I try to stand and move out of his reach, but I sit frozen on the swing’s seat, hands clenched white around the chains.

  Yet the boy doesn’t try to hold me. He only tries his empty smile once more.

  “I hoped you appreciated my gift.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I say, though instantly, I do.

  “The man who was enjoying your wife in a way you have never known. Not to worry. Professor Junger won’t be bringing anyone pleasure ever again.”

  The boy grins.

  Gonna be a hot one, he says in Will Junger’s voice.

  Somewhere, not far off, there is the thud and scratch of something heavy moving through the deadfall. Perhaps many things, though of one mind.

  “Let me understand,” I say, hoping a new question might wipe away the terrible shape of the boy’s gaping mouth. “You see me as a crusader? For you? Your master?”

  “It is a different time since John wrote his poem,” the boy whispers in nostalgic regret. “We are living in the Documentary Age. People demand veracity. The unmediated truth. It is no longer time for the poem to make our case, but evidence. Yet this alone is not enough. We need you, David. The personal account. A human voice, speaking for us.”

  “Saying that real demons exist in the world.”

  “It is an old story,” he says, jumping off the swing. “It is also true.”

  The boy starts away. The space between us hardened by the cold he leaves in his wake.

  “I’ll do it! Please! Just let her go!”

  I lift my eyes and the dark forest is gone. It is only a playground bordered by chain-link fence and, beyond it, downmarket townhouses with their curtains drawn. Air conditioners throatily humming like a Gregorian choir.

  The boy turns. Though nothing has visibly changed in his expression, the potency of his hatred can be felt even more acutely now, a short distance off, the veil of his charm lowered to show something closer to his actual nature. The bright agony of a blade splitting the nerve. A rank odor of decay.

  Like something in the ground.

  “You have one last discovery to make. One last truth. Your truth, David.”

  The boy walks on. Watching me even with his back turned. A child whose shadow stretches as long as a towering beast’s across the grass.

  21

  IT ISN’T UNTIL WE CROSS THE STATE LINE FROM FLORIDA INTO Georgia that O’Brien ventures to ask why I’m so sure Toby has pointed us to Canada.

  “It wasn’t Toby,” I tell her.

  “Then how do you know?”

  “Kevin Lilley told me.”

  “David, that’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “That boy can’t speak.”

  “He spoke to me.”

  “Well, I didn’t hear it.”

  “You weren’t supposed to.”

  For a moment, a jealous frown pulls against O’Brien’s features. She tries to hide it from me by looking out the passenger window but I catch it nevertheless. You don’t get to win the scholarships and grants and research chairs she’s won without being competitive.

  “Belial had Kevin memorize something. Something he managed to whisper to me,” I say, hoping to draw O’Brien back with the lure of an implied question. It works.

  “Paradise Lost,” she says. “What lines?”

  “A dungeon horrible, on all sides round / As one great furnace flamed—”

  “—yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible.”

  “Them’s the ones.”

  “I don’t get it. We’re going to a dungeon? A furnace?”

  “It ain’t the penthouse suite.”

  I explain how I didn’t understand it at first, either. There was no word that jumped out as a destination, no city or state veiled by poetry. Though I had a good idea that no matter what it was, it had something to do with me. Which turned out to be an idea confirmed by Toby’s farewell.

  Your truth, David.

  “If it’s personal for you, then it must be personal for me, too,” O’Brien muses. “Not to know me argues yourselves unknown. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “How can our two lives lead to the same truth?”

  “I don’t know. But I think I know where it’s going to happen.”

  The lines Kevin recited tell of Satan surveying hell, his home. Also his prison. A dungeon in name, though not necessarily in substance, as it is a place just as often described as a lake of fire.

  “Once I thought of this, I knew I had it,” I say.

  “Great. But I still need some help.”

  “Lake. Fire. We lived in a cabin for a couple years when I was a kid. One of my father’s many stretches of whisky-inspired unemployment.”

  “A lakeside cabin,” O’Brien says, pounding her fist on the dash. “Let me guess. One that burned down.”

  “Half right. A cabin by a river. A river that feeds into Fireweed Lake.”

  “The river where your brother drowned.”

  “I never told you he drowned.”

  “But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she says, her voice retreating to a cracked whisper. “Consider me convinced.”

  I ASK O’BRIEN TO DRIVE FOR A WHILE AND PRETEND TO SLEEP IN the backseat. Instead, I open Tess’s journal to where I left off last time. Reading her words as much for the shape of the letters she made as what she expressed. Her hand, working over these pages. The trace of a presence I can almost touch, almost summon into being.

  Dad always tells me things about when I was a kid. Things I don’t really remember because I was too young. But they seem like my memories now, I’ve heard the stories so many times.

  Like this one:

  When I wasn’t even two yet, I would climb into bed with my mom and dad early in the mornings. My dad was always first to wake up. He’d try to let my mom sleep, so he was usually the one to take me to the bathroom and pour my cereal, etc., etc. He says it was his favorite part of the day. But I’ve heard him say the same thing about reading bedtime stories. And seeing my face when he picked me up from kindergarten. And the two of us sitting at the diner counter and having tuna sandwiches. And brushing my hair after a bath.

  Anyway, he would wake up first and I’d be there LOOKING at him. Three inches from his face. (Dad always says it was close enough to taste my breath. What did it taste like? Warm bread, he says.)

  I would ask him the same question every day:

  “Are you happy, Daddy?”

  “I’m happy now,” he’d say every time.

  The funny part about it is I still want to ask my dad the same thing. Even now. Not just because I’m interested in the answer. I want to be able to make him happy by asking. To be breathing near him and for him to feel it and for that to be enough.

  And then, along with the entries like these, something odd.

  Insertions that don’t line up with what precedes or follows them. A second voice more powerful than the first, cutting through.

  Dad thinks he can run from what follows him. Maybe he doesn’t even see it, or tells himself he doesn’t. IT DOESN
’T MATTER. It’s coming for him just the same. Like it’s coming for me.

  I saw a nature documentary about grizzly bears once. It said that if you encounter a bear in the wild, you should never run, but stand your ground. Talk to it. Running marks you as prey. As food.

  The ones that run never get away.

  But maybe, if you face it, you can show you’re not scared. You can get a little more time. Find a way to escape for good.

  When the time comes, I won’t run. I’ll look at it STRAIGHT ON. Maybe it’ll be enough to give Dad a chance.

  Because if the bear doesn’t take one of us, it will take us both.

  How did Tess know all this? How could she see what I had hidden so well I couldn’t see myself? I was always aware of our closeness, the amount of unspoken information we could pass in a look over the dinner table or in a rearview mirror glance. Yet I thought we were no more special than the luckiest of similarly hardwired fathers and daughters.

  Turns out she could read far deeper signals than that. How we shared the unwanted gift of melancholy, the burden of the Black Crown which, for us, was what opened a doorway through which other things could come and go. The entities that usually go by the name of spirits but feel heavier and more willfully destructive than the wispy apparitions that word implies. Beings long ago separated from their bodies but so fierce in their search for new skins they are indifferent to the harm they cause, indeed take pleasure in that harm, as they slip inside the living again for a time. What they leave behind is never the same again, the ones who walk among us but whose stares go emptily through us.

  It makes me think of my father. How whatever marks Tess and me marked him as well. A man who grieved before he ever lost anything, who suffered without any obvious grounds for suffering. Through his distance from us, his family, through moving from town to town, through alcohol, he tried to run from the bear that stalked him. And in the end, Tess was right. The ones who run never get away.

  Maybe I’d been running since then, too. But not anymore.

  I CALL MY WIFE FROM A KFC MEN’S ROOM STALL.

  Not that there’s anything to say—that is, there’s too much that cannot be said—but there is the unavoidable compulsion to try. That I make the attempt sitting on a closed-lid john while absently reading some of the filthiest graffiti I’ve ever seen strikes me as oddly appropriate.