The Demonologist Read online

  A slight pause before he lunges his head at me. Stretching his neck and shoulders as far as the restraints allow. And even farther. His body elasticized, extending forward whole inches past what I would have guessed the natural length of his spine would allow.

  I step back again to a safe distance. Record what feels like minute after minute of his seizure. Barks. Spits of white froth. Voices emanating from within him, growling and hissing.

  He is insane. A violent madman in the middle of an extended fit.

  Or this is what I try to convince myself it is. It doesn’t work.

  Everything he does is too intentional to be a sickness of the mind. It appears to be the random, pointless sufferings of some advanced neurological corrosion, but isn’t. What is being shown is the revelation of an identity, however alien. It has the patterns, the crescendos, the dramatic pauses, that come from some internal consciousness. One meant for the camera to record. For me.

  More unsettling than his most explicit shocks—the feminine cackle, the agonized whinnies, the eyes rolling back in his head to reveal whites so bloodshot they appear as tiny maps of pain—are the moments when he suddenly sits still and looks at me. No words, no contortions. His persona is “normal,” or what I take to be what remains of his formerly sane self: a man of roughly my own age, unsure of his whereabouts and trying to calculate who I am, how he might alter his situation, find the way home. A man of intelligence.

  And then, each time, his expression changes. He remembers who he is, the nature of his plague, and a cascade of sensations—images? emotions? memories?—returns to him in a rush.

  That’s when he screams.

  A voice wholly his own. The note rising in his throat, then shattering into a kind of sob. His terror so instant and crystalline it dehumanizes him in a way that even his most grotesque displays cannot equal.

  He looks at me and reaches out his hand.

  It reminds me of Tess at two years old, learning to swim on a summer holiday on Long Island. She would take a step from the shallows and feel the sandy bottom slip deeper beneath her, at the same time as a wave washed over her. Each time she spat out a mouthful of sea her hand would shoot up for me to save her. She could repeat this near-death experience a dozen times in a single afternoon. And although she was lifted into my arms within a quarter-second each time, her desperation was the same.

  The difference between Tess and this man is that while Tess knew what frightened her—the water, the deep—he doesn’t have any idea. It isn’t a disease. It is a presence. A will a thousand times stronger than his own. There is no fighting it. There is only the recognition that he is damned, coming to him anew each time.

  Finally, he stops. Slumps into a sleep that is not a sleep.

  4:43

  Only now do my hands start to shake. For the preceding moments the camera might as well have stood on a tripod, it was held so firmly in place. Now, as the impact of all I’ve just seen hits me, the frame wobbles with nauseating jerks and corrections, as though with the man’s stillness the camera itself has come to life.

  5:24

  A voice.

  The sound of it stills my hands. Frames the man in the chair squarely once more. Yet he doesn’t move. The voice comes from him—it must come from him—but there is nothing in his form to confirm that it has.

  Professor Ullman.

  It takes a moment to recognize that the voice has directly addressed me. And that its language isn’t English, but Latin.

  Lorem sumus.

  We have been waiting.

  The voice is male, but only in its register, not in its character. In fact, though it commands in the way of a human utterance, it is strangely non-gendered. An unoccupied medium, in the way even the most sophisticated computer-generated voice is detectable as a surrogate for a real human presence.

  I wait for the voice to go on. But there is only the terrible breathing, louder now.

  6:12

  “Who are you?”

  My voice. Sounding tinny and scratched as an old 78 record.

  His head lifts again. This time his expression belongs to neither the snarling madman nor his terrified “normal” self, but something new. Becalmed. His face bearing the insinuating smile of the priest, the door-to-door salesman. Yet with a fury beneath the surface. A hate contained by the skin but not by the eyes.

  “We do not have names.”

  I need to challenge what it says. Because what happens next will decide everything. Somehow I know this. It’s essential to not let it see that I think it might be anything other than a symptom of mental disease. This isn’t real. The reassurance offered to a child reading a story of witches or giants. There’s no such thing. The impossible mustn’t be allowed to gain purchase in the possible. You resist fear by denying it.

  “ ‘We,’ ” I start, doing my best to smooth the trembling from my words. “Don’t you mean your name is Legion, for you are many?”

  “We are many. Though you will only meet one.”

  “Aren’t we meeting now?”

  “Not with the intimacy of the one you will come to know.”

  “The Devil?”

  “Not the master. One who sits with him.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  It says nothing to this. The silence highlighting the vacancy of my lie.

  “So you can foretell my future?” I go on. “This is as common a delusion as one believing one is possessed by spirits.”

  It takes a breath. A long pull that, for a moment, empties the room of all its oxygen. It leaves me in a vacuum. Weightless and suffocating.

  “Your attempts at doubt are unconvincing, Professor,” it says.

  “My doubt is real,” I say, though the tone betrays the words. You are winning, it says instead. You’ve already won.

  “You must prepare for an education in what frightens you.”

  “Why not begin now?”

  It smiles.

  “Soon you will be among us,” it says.

  At this, part of me floats up and away from my body. Looks down on myself to see my mouth ask a question it has already asked.

  “Who are you?”

  “Man has given us names, though we have none.”

  “No. You won’t tell me who you are because there is power in knowing the name of one’s enemy.”

  “We are not enemies.”

  “Then what are we?”

  “Conspirators.”

  “Conspirators? What is our cause?”

  It laughs. A low, satisfied rumble that seems to come up from the foundations of the house, from the ground beneath it.

  “New York 1259537. Tokyo 996314. Toronto 1389257. Frankfurt 540553. London 590643.”

  When it stops, the man’s eyes roll back in his head to show the bloodshot whites. It takes an impossibly long breath. Holds it. Lets it out in words that carry the acrid sting of charred flesh.

  “On the twenty-seventh day of April . . . the world will be marked by our numbers.”

  The head falls forward. The man’s body still again. Only the low breathing that keeps him this side of death.

  8:22

  Three minutes. That’s how long I was in conversation with it. With them. Three minutes that already feel like a whole chapter of my life, a stretch like Adolescence or Fatherhood in which the terms of selfhood are fundamentally redefined. The time between 5:24 and 8:22 will be When I Spoke to the Man in Venice. And it will be a period marked by regret. A loss I can’t guess the shape of yet.

  Time to go.

  If I was brought here to witness the symptoms of this diseased man’s mind, then I’ve seen enough. Indeed, the wish that I’d never entered this room at all is so strong I find that I’m shuffling backward toward the door, putting inch after inch of distance between myself and the sleeping man, trying to pretend that I might rewind the last quarter hour and erase it from my memory as easily as I could erase it from the camera that records my retreat.

  But there will be no forget
ting. The camera will hold the man’s words with the same vividness that I will.

  And then he does something that will be even more impossible to erase.

  He wakens and raises his head. Slowly this time.

  It is the man’s face, though altered in a way perhaps I alone could detect. A number of fluid, minute adjustments to his features that, collectively, shift his identity from whoever he once was to someone else, someone I know. The eyes slightly closer together, the nose longer, the lips thinned. My father’s face.

  I try to scream. Nothing comes out. The only sound is the voice the man speaks with, my father coming out from within. His seething accusation, his bitterness. The voice of a man who has been dead for over thirty years.

  “It should have been you,” it says.

  6

  I STUMBLE FROM THE ROOM AND DOWN THE STAIRS. FIND MY FEET, lurch through the empty waiting room—no sign of the physician—and out to the narrow street. I run from 3627 without looking back, though part of me wants to, a part that knows if I look the man will be standing at the second-floor window, released from his restraints, grinning down at me.

  It’s only after the fire in my chest forces me to rest against a wall protected from the sun that I realize I am still holding the camera. And that it’s still recording.

  11:53

  My thumb presses STOP. The screen blackens.

  All at once I’m doubled over, retching onto the bricks. An ache in my bones, angry and unforeseen. It bears a similarity to every other flu I’ve ever had, though there’s something distinct about it in addition to its suddenness. The nearest I can come to describing it is that it’s not physiological, not an illness at all, but a thought. The infection of a virulent idea.

  I wipe my lips on the shoulder of my jacket and carry on.

  Tess.

  I’ve got to get back to her. Make sure she’s okay, then get on the next flight to New York—to anywhere—whether I’ve got malaria or worse. We have to go.

  First, though, I’ve got to find my way to the Grand Canal. Any vaporetto stop will do. It shouldn’t be too hard. Not that I have any idea where I am. So long as I keep moving, I’ll eventually come out at the water.

  It doesn’t work.

  I’m lost even worse than I was with Tess in our stroll around the hotel last night. And instead of charm, what I feel now is a crushing panic so great I’m grinding my teeth on tears. There is the need to return to Tess, the anxiety of not knowing where I am, the fever that twists the calle before me into an undulating tunnel. And there is also the certainty that I am being pursued. Something hulking and close, just behind me.

  I break into a run again. Turn a corner. As I do, before I see what’s there, I smell it. The same barnyard smell that clung to the Thin Woman.

  But it isn’t she standing in the lane in front of me. It’s a herd of pigs.

  A dozen of them or more. All turned my way, nostrils flaring. Impossible, yet undeniably there. Too detailed in their appearance to be a side effect of whatever is making me feel poisoned. Too aware of who I am.

  The animals come at me. Squealing as though scalded. Their hooves clattering over the stone.

  I back up and swing around the corner I just turned. Wait for their teeth to find my skin, to break it open and eat.

  But they don’t come. I look around the corner. The ramo is empty.

  Don’t stop to understand. You may never understand any of this.

  My internal O’Brien again.

  Just keep going.

  So I keep going.

  And at the end of the next calle I turn onto—one whose length I’m sure I have already run down at least once if not three times—there is the Grand Canal. Appearing out of nowhere as though at the turning of a page.

  Don’t stop.

  Something is happening.

  But she’s safe.

  There’s no such thing anymore.

  How do you know?

  Because it knows who she is.

  7

  I SIT AT THE BACK OF THE BOAT, BITING AT AIR. TRY TO THINK only of Tess, of returning to Tess, of escaping with Tess. Relieving the babysitter, calling the airlines, arranging a water taxi. Putting this sinking city behind us.

  Yet other thoughts muscle through. My professor’s brain providing footnotes, interpretations. The text at hand is the last hour of my life. And the reading—nonsensical, unstoppable—is that my experience reflects what has been written of previous encounters between man and demon.

  I try to bring Tess’s face to my mind. Instead the man in the chair appears. His skin pulling away to reveal the true face of the thing inside him.

  It swings my thoughts away to something else.

  The Gerasene demon. Twice noted in the gospels by Luke and Mark. In the telling, Jesus came upon a naked, homeless man living in the tombs, a man “which had devils a long time.” Upon seeing Christ, the demon begged not to be tormented. Jesus asked its name, and it answered “Legion,” for it was not a single demon but many that possessed the man. And the savior cast them out, transferring them into a nearby herd of pigs.

  Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were drowned.

  The man strapped to the chair at Santa Croce 3627, bound as the possessed man at Gerasene had been repeatedly and unsuccessfully bound, also claimed to be without a name, though composed of many. And then the herd of pigs stampeding toward me in the maze of lanes. Either I hallucinated it, or it is a coincidence well beyond the random.

  Stop this! the O’Brien in my head tells me.

  But it can’t be stopped.

  Another ancient text, this one apocryphal. The Compendium Maleficarum, written by Brother Francesco Maria Guazzo in 1608, has been taken by the Vatican and other theological bodies as a primary guide in the matters of demonic possession and exorcism. Guazzo offers fifty ways to tell if possession is real, and includes the sensation of ants under the skin, along with accurate foretellings of future events and voices in your head saying things beyond your own understanding, but which are nevertheless true.

  These three signs come to me in particular, as my flu-like symptoms include a maddening whole-body itchiness that has me considering jumping out of the vaporetto to be cooled by the waters of the Grand Canal. And what is to be made of the list of cities the presence within the man uttered, along with the numbers? Is it a code? Addresses? Phone numbers? Whatever they are, they came attached to a date a few days from now. April 27th. When “the world will be marked by our numbers.”

  And then my father’s voice. Telling me it should have been me.

  I told you not to think, O’Brien says.

  All the landmarks I’d learned from the guidebooks slide past as the vaporetto approaches the hotel, but I can’t recall their names now, let alone the tidbits I’d learned about their histories. They are merely old, pretty buildings. Free of the reverence I’d brought to them yesterday, the façades suggesting only falsehood today, elaborate decoration meant to disguise their original owners’ lusts and greed. How can I see this? It seems that with my flu-that-isn’t-a-flu has come a kind of X-ray vision, one capable of looking into structures—into the people who made them—and seeing their base motivations. A perspective that brings with it a terrible despair. The claustrophobia of being human.

  It’s a feeling that precedes the return of a memory. Something I have expertly ignored through scholarship, family life, the thousand little tricks of avoidance the mind can be trained to perform every day. But now it comes back with such vividness I am powerless to dim its images.

  My brother, drowning.

  His arms thrashing at the water of the river behind our family’s cabin, his head under and not coming up. Then his arms stop, too. He drifts downstream. Slower than the current, as though his feet dragged along the river bottom in resistance even in death.

  I was six years old.

  “Mister Ullman?”

/>   Someone is standing over me. A man in a black suit, reaching down.

  “Yes?”

  “Welcome back to the Bauer. You have enjoyed your afternoon?”

  I RUSH UPSTAIRS TO OUR SUITE. IT ONLY TAKES A MINUTE OR TWO, but feels torturously longer. What draws it out are the new horrific images of what I will find in the room once I open the door.

  Tess hurt.

  Tess snarling and thrashing like the man in the room, the babysitter helpless to restrain her.

  Tess gone.

  I’ve failed her. I was tricked, sent to the house in Santa Croce as a diversion. The goal was not to record a phenomenon, but to separate me from my daughter in a foreign city so that she might be taken away.

  Yet when I kick the door to our suite open, she is there. The sitting room’s glass doors open wide, the Grand Canal sparkling outside them. Tess writing in her journal on the sofa, the babysitter watching a muted soap on the TV.

  “Dad!”

  Tess rushes over to me. Rewards me with an embrace that is almost enough to make my illness lift away from me.

  “You’re all hot,” she says, touching my hands, the sides of my face.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “Your eyes.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re all, like, seriously bloodshot.”

  “Just a touch of flu. Don’t worry, sweetheart.”

  The babysitter stands behind Tess, trying to maintain her smile. But she too finds my appearance distressing. A glance at the front hall’s mirror and I see why.

  “Thank you. Grazie.”

  I hand her a wad of euros roughly double the negotiated fee, yet she takes the bills with some reluctance, as though whatever ails me might transfer from the paper to her.

  When she’s gone, I tell Tess we have to go.

  “Because you’re sick?”

  “No, baby. Because . . . I don’t like it here.”

  “I like it here.”