The Demonologist Read online

  My eyes open against the spray of hot water. Steam fills not only the glass-walled shower stall but the whole bathroom, so that the room is alive with billowing fog.

  Nothing there. But I stare into it just the same.

  And watch Tess come out.

  Shaking with hunger, with fear. Her skin bruised by cold. Reaching out to me but stopped by the glass. Her palms as darkly lined as ancient maps.

  “Tess!”

  She opens her mouth to speak just as a pair of arms slips around her and pulls her back into the fog.

  Arms too long, too grotesquely muscled to be a man’s. Blackened by hair thick as fur. Their claws soil-stained as a beast’s.

  9

  ONCE I’VE CHANGED INTO CLEAN CLOTHES AND AT LEAST PARTLY cleared my head, I get the digital camera the physician gave me in Venice and download the footage I recorded of the man in the chair onto my laptop. The reason I do this occurs to me only after I’m done.

  This is important.

  I don’t know why yet. But it was the one thing the physician insisted on. For you. So whoever was giving him his instructions wanted me to have it. To train the lens on the man in the chair and record what he said, what he did. Why else give me the camera at all?

  So what did the man do and say?

  I watch the recording on my laptop’s screen. Its reality pulses out at me in the way that even the most vivid news clip or documentary has never done before. A physical blow to my chest that forces me back on the sofa. And it’s not just the disturbing sounds and images that do it. There is something about the effect the recording has that is distinct from its content. How to put it? An aura of the pain from which it originates. A subliminal glimpse of chaos. A Black Crown.

  There are the voices, the words, the tortured writhings of the body. But the only thing I write down in my notebook is the list of cities and numbers the voice said would be of relevance on April 27th. The day after tomorrow.

  New York 1259537

  Tokyo 996314

  Toronto 1389257

  Frankfurt 540553

  London 590643

  The presence offered this as a piece of what is to come. A snapshot of the imperceptible future that, if correct, would prove its skills, its power. Its reality.

  As the recording continues, I close my eyes when the man’s face changes into my father’s. It doesn’t prevent me from hearing the old man’s voice.

  It should have been you.

  As awful as it is to interpret his words, I can’t help feeling he means something even worse than his wishing I’d drowned instead of my brother.

  Rewind. Again. Eyes open this time.

  I watch his image on the screen and know, inarguably, that it is my father speaking to me from wherever he went after we buried him. And he is revealing a secret that I can’t fully understand yet. An invitation to seek him out, nearly as irresistible as Tess’s.

  When the recording is finished replaying, I close the laptop and return it to its leather travel bag. Then I wrap the camera in an old jewelry bag of Diane’s and put them both inside a briefcase. I think of simply placing it on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, but something tells me it requires more care than that. There is no hiding place in the apartment good enough.

  I start out with the briefcase, with the absurd idea of going to a pawnshop and getting a pair of handcuffs so that I might attach the handle to my wrist. As I walk, however, I come up with some better ideas. What I need to do is stash it where even I won’t be able to access it until after the 27th, when the prediction it contains can be proven true or false without any question of my tampering with it.

  Do they have safe deposit boxes big enough for a briefcase? Here’s the thing about banks I learn over the next three hours: They have safe deposit boxes big enough for a sedan if you’re ready to pay.

  And they’ll do more or less anything else for money, too. For instance, whether you have an account or not (I choose a Midtown main branch I’ve never entered before), they will place your belongings in a box in a vault that can only be opened by way of a numerical code of your own devising. They will bring in a silver-haired senior partner at a prominent law firm to prepare a document ensuring no bank employee or manager will allow anyone—including myself—to access the box until after April 27th, then have the manager sign it and register copies with the bank, the law firm, and an envelope for my pocket. They will provide a written guarantee that the box will not be opened for at least ninety-nine years unless either myself or someone with my signed permission and the numerical code shows up. They even offer you a cup of reasonably decent coffee while you wait for it all to be done.

  On the way home, I put in a call to a guy I know in the IT department at Columbia. After some roundabout, isn’t-this-heat-a-bitch chat, I ask him some questions. In particular, I want to know if it would be possible to alter the time a video download is registered to have occurred on a hard drive after it’s happened or, alternatively, to make any record of the download having happened go away.

  He pauses, and I imagine the internal dialogue in his mind:

  Q: Why would a professor of literature want to know that?

  A: Porn.

  Eventually, he answers no. It would be “pretty damn difficult” to erase a download entirely or make one saved on the 25th look like it happened on the 28th. “Stuff like that always leaves fingerprints,” he says with a verbal wink, a warning for the next time I want to grab something nasty off the Internet without the wife finding out.

  What I don’t tell him is the wife is gone. And that I don’t want to erase my download. What I want is to ensure that the time I transferred it from the camera to my laptop says the same thing as the date and time recorded on the footage itself: that the document reflects events—and spoken cities and numbers—that occurred before April 27th.

  Like a magician ensuring nothing is up his sleeve, I feel like I’ve done everything I can to establish the conditions for a real trick. If I’m able to figure out what the cities and numbers mean on the 27th, and if they correspond to verifiable reality, the magic of the recording is real.

  And as the Compendium Maleficarum’s Brother Guazzo would note, if miracles are one way the savior proves his identity, magic is the way demons prove theirs.

  LATER, ANOTHER CHURCH. THIS ONE OURS, IF ONLY NOMINALLY, AS our attendance has been limited to three Christmas Eves of the last five and an annual donation from Diane’s personal account. Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, uptown on West 86th Street. Chosen by Diane for its progressive congregation and fuzzily inoffensive denomination (United Methodist). A community we chose but didn’t, in practice, belong to.

  Though today it’s serving a purpose. Tess’s memorial service. Hastily arranged by Diane and announced to me only yesterday in an e-mail buckshot with “healing” and “process” and “closure.” I’ve come for her sake, to present a united parental front. It’s what you do on occasions such as these. You show up.

  But now that I’m here, standing across the street from the building’s octagonal tower I’d barely noticed before but which today looks ominously Venetian, watching the dark-suited colleagues and peripheral friends and members of Diane’s extended family all hauling wreaths and their hesitant selves up the steps, I know I can’t go in. To enter would be the same as admitting that Tess is dead. If she isn’t, it might pull her away from me. And if she is, I don’t need the help of near-strangers to remember who she was.

  I watch the last of them return their phones to their pockets and slip inside. But before I start away, Diane steps out into the sunshine. She must have been welcoming the guests at the door, letting them pat the back of her hand and replying with the appropriate phrases she’d be good at credibly repeating. Now, with the organ starting its prelude, she’s come to take a last look around. A last look for me.

  I wait until she finds me. There is nothing on her face. A more honest expression than any she’d offered those within. It’s her feeling of vacan
cy, I see now, that is intolerable for her, and today’s service is part of an effort to start filling up the space. With activity, with words, with starting out here and heading off to there.

  She raises her palm, as though to show me the lines drawn on it and invite a reading of their meaning. It’s a half wave, perhaps, or merely a twitch. Something unintended or abandoned. Then, once she’s returned her arm to her side, she backs into the darkness and the doors are pushed shut from inside.

  THERE’S SOMEONE WAITING FOR ME ON THE STREET OUTSIDE MY apartment.

  That is to say, there’s a man in his midthirties standing with his hands in his pockets near the entrance to my building, casually glancing into traffic from time to time as though waiting for a cab, yet when one comes along, he turns his back on it like he’s changed his mind. There is no indication, when I spot him the moment I turn the corner off Columbus Avenue, that he is waiting for me. I’ve never seen him before in my life. And he is, at this distance at least, a near-perfect composite of the nondescript: white cotton shirt rolled up his forearms, weekend jeans, dark hair cropped short. Not tall but solid, a frame used to delivering and absorbing blows. He could be ex-military. And he could hold one of the vaguely rough-and-ready jobs so many former servicemen hold in New York. Limo driver, personal security, doorman, bartender.

  So what is it that sets him apart? His lack of distinction. Every posture, the way he’s tucked in his shirt, the calculated curl of his lower lip. He is someone who has been trained not to stand out. And given the visitations over the last week of my life, when a man like that stands by my door, he stands there for me.

  Yet, as I approach, he doesn’t seem to notice me at all. I’m almost past him when he addresses my back.

  “David Ullman?”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is George Barone.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “It wouldn’t.”

  I stare at him a moment.

  “Es vos vir aut anima?” I ask him in Latin. Are you man or spirit?

  He doesn’t appear to understand the question. Nor does he seem surprised that I’ve just addressed him in an ancient language.

  “Can I buy you a coffee?” he says. “Perhaps the street isn’t the best place for conversation.”

  “Who says we’re having a conversation?”

  “I’m sure this neighborhood isn’t lacking for cafés. I would be pleased if you would guide me to your favorite,” he says, ignoring my question, coming up alongside me so that his shoulder sidles against mine. From twenty yards away, we would look like old friends paused in deciding whether to head east or west to grab a drink.

  “Why should I talk to you?” I ask.

  “It’s in your best interests.”

  “You’re here to help me?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Normally, I would walk away from an exchange with a stranger like this. But now I have to open every door, accept every invitation. Even if it doesn’t feel like it could lead to much good.

  To get closer to Tess, I will have to say yes to everything.

  A journey of your own making.

  “Sure,” I say. “There’s a good place this way.”

  WE WALK WEST TO AMSTERDAM, AND AROUND THE CORNER TO the The Coffee Bean, where we find a table at the window. The man who calls himself George Barone buys me a cappuccino, but nothing for himself.

  “Ulcer,” he explains as he delivers my coffee and sits across from me. Relaxed and friendly, but only seeming relaxed and friendly. I’m no expert in this area, but something about this man suggests a capacity for violence, the carrying out of unthinkable assignments. What gives him away is how he pays attention only to me. No pretty girl—or handsome boy—who comes near our table attracts even the briefest glance from him. When a barista drops a tray of mugs and they explode on the tiled floor, he doesn’t blink. His focus like a bird of prey.

  “Stress,” I say. “Always is with ulcers.”

  “My doctor says otherwise.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s he say?”

  “Coffee. Cigarettes. Booze. He recommends the avoidance of pleasure.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Keeps me sharp.”

  “What do you do, Mr. Barone? What do you keep so sharp for?”

  “I’m a freelancer.”

  “You write?”

  “No.”

  “Your business is more practical, then?”

  “I pursue. Let’s put it that way.”

  “A professional pursuer. And your current quarry is me?”

  “Only indirectly.”

  He waits, as though I am the one expected to report something to him. I sip my coffee. Stir it. Add sugar. Sip it again.

  “Are you an assassin?” I ask finally.

  “Are you still alive?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  “Then let’s not worry about it.”

  “What should we worry about?”

  “Nothing. If you help me, right now, nothing at all.”

  He touches a fingertip to the table, picks up a crystal of sugar. Stares at it as though determining the quality of a cut diamond.

  “The man you saw in Venice,” he says. “Do you know who he was?”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “Quite a lot, in some respects. Though I am informed of only the facts that will assist me in my task. I’m sure you have questions I can’t answer.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Like that, for instance.”

  “Is it the Church? Do you know who sent that woman to my office?”

  “I’m not aware of any woman. I’m only aware of us. Here. Right now.”

  And it’s true. He is only aware of us. His calm concentration negating the world with a hypnotist’s gaze.

  “That’s very Buddhist,” I say.

  “Is it? I wouldn’t know. I’m just an altar boy from Astoria with a job to do.”

  “So you’re some kind of Vatican thug? That it?”

  “I hope you’re not being rude.”

  “Who else would you be working for? Does the Devil hire meatheads like you—sorry, pursuers? Either way, they flew me first class, you know. Whatever they’re paying you to harass me, you’ve got to ask for a raise.”

  “Let me ask you again,” he says, ignoring my attack. “Do you know who the man at Santa Croce 3627 was?”

  “Was? What happened to him?”

  “Suicide. That’s what the authorities have ruled it, anyway. History of depression, strange and uncharacteristic behavior of late, then went AWOL altogether. It’s a pretty easy file to close.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Painfully.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Toxin ingestion. Battery acid, to be precise. A difficult thing to swallow a liter of, even if your goal is to end your life. Trust me. That shit burns.”

  “Maybe somebody helped him.”

  “There you go. Now you’re picking up steam, Professor.”

  “You think he was murdered.”

  “Not in the conventional sense.”

  “What’s the unconventional sense?”

  “Foul play,” he says, and smiles at the phrase. “There was most likely some very fucking foul play.”

  “You did it.”

  “No, not me. Something worse.”

  I feel my knees click together under the table, and it takes a second to set them apart again.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” the Pursuer continues.

  “I’d forgotten you’d asked one.”

  “Do you know who he was?”

  “No.”

  “Then let me tell you. He was you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Dr. Marco Ianno.”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  “I figured you might have. A fellow academic. A professor of Christian studies at Sapienza for some years now. Father
of two, married. Quite well regarded in his home country for his defenses of the Church, though, interestingly, not personally a member of the Church himself. His writings concerned the necessary relationship between human imagination and faith.”

  “Sounds like one of my lectures.”

  “There you go again. They don’t just hand out those PhDs for nothing.”

  “Why are you telling me this? You came here to deliver a warning?”

  “I’m not a courier.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  He presses the sugar crystal on his finger onto the table with a tiny, audible crunch.

  “I believe you have a document,” he says.

  “I got plenty. You should see my office.”

  “It may be written, or a photograph. Though my bet is it’s a video. Am I correct?”

  I don’t answer. And he shrugs slightly, as though he is well used to this kind of initial resistance.

  “Whatever it is,” he goes on, “you have something that you took from that room in Venice that I’d like you to give me.”

  “Don’t tell me. You’re going to write an astronomical sum on this napkin in return for it.”

  “No. It’s a matter of accounting. Paper trails. There can be no residue to the transaction.”

  “I’m just supposed to hand this thing—this document—over. That it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s my motivation?”

  “The possible avoidance of following in Professor Ianno’s footsteps. And me, of course. There’s avoiding me.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Something passes over his face. So quick I might have only imagined it. A twitch at the top of his cheek. A switched gear.

  “You don’t want to play it like that, David.”

  “There was a time, not long ago at all, when a fellow like you, saying the things you’re saying, would frighten me. But not anymore.”

  “I suggest you reconsider that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I should frighten you. And if not me, there are other things. Really quite remarkable things.”

  “The things that killed Marco Ianno.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re in control of these things?”

  “No. Nobody is. But they seem to have an interest in you.”