The Demonologist (16 page)

“Have a good one, now!”

B
UT THIS ISN
’
T A GOOD ONE.

Driving dog-tired through the night, taking exits at random, parking on farmhouse lanes with the lights off to confirm I’m no longer being followed.

It seems to work. By the time the first colorings of dawn push up against the horizon, there’s no longer any sign of the Pursuer. It allows me to consult the map and plot out my advance on North Dakota. I decide to stick to the secondary roads and avoid the interstates. Forgo sleep and just keep driving. Use the jittery energy of all-nighters and see how far it will take me.

Trouble is, this kind of thing has its side effects. Pasty sweats. Indigestion. Along with seeing things.

Like the person up ahead, for instance. A girl with her thumb out in the universal beckoning of the hitchhiker. Except the girl is Tess.

I come down heavier on the gas just to put the vision behind me. As I pass, I make a point of keeping my eyes off her, as I know it
can’t
be her, and if it
isn’t
her, then it’s more likely to be something nasty. A nightmare mask donned by the Unnamed for the hell of it. For the pain it causes.

Yet when I risk a glance in the rearview after I fly by, she’s still
there. Not Tess at all, but a few years older than her. Looking more scared than I am.

I pull the Mustang over and she runs along the shoulder, a soiled Dora the Explorer knapsack bumping against her hip. There is the urge to drive on. Even if she is not involved in what O’Brien believes is my deluded mythmaking, there is little good that can come from picking up human strays on Iowa country roads. I am breaking the New Yorker’s rule of not getting involved.

Yet even as she comes into more particular view in the mirror, her run now slowed to a walk, I can see she has the blank-faced look of those who’ve been on their own for too long. Attempting escape. She looks less and less like Tess with each approaching step she takes. But she has more in common with me.

She opens the door and plops into the passenger seat before she looks at me. And when she does, it’s not at my face, but my hands. Gauging to see if they are capable of harm.

“Where you going?” I ask.

She peers ahead. “Straight.”

“That’s not a place.”

“Guess I’m not sure where I’m going.”

“Are you in trouble?”

She looks me in the face for the first time. “Don’t take me to the police.”

“I won’t. Not if you don’t want me to. I just need to know if you’ve been hurt.”

She smiles to show a surprising mouthful of yellow teeth. “Not the hospital kind of hurt, no.”

She turns to look out the rear window, as though she’s being followed, too. I roll back onto the road and put a mile behind us before looking at her again.

“You look like a dad,” she says.

“Is it the gray hair?”

“No. You just
do
.” And then: “You look like my dad.”

“Funny, because you look a little like my daughter. But she’s younger. How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she says. And now, in the Mustang’s close quarters, she doesn’t look like Tess at all, which makes my saying she did a lie, too.

“You still live with your family?” I ask.

But she’s not listening. She’s picked up my iPhone from where I’d stuck it in the car’s cup holder, touching its screen, her fingers jumping back from the actions they cause as though she’s never seen such a thing.

“It’s a phone,” I say. “You want to talk to somebody?”

She ponders this a moment. “Yes.”

“Go ahead. You know the number?”

“They don’t have a number.”

“The phone lines don’t reach them where they live?”

She makes a sucking sound through her teeth that may be a smothered show of mirth. Continues to play with the screen, moving through apps with greater speed as though she is learning the device’s capacities as she goes. It gives me a chance to steal glances at her without being noticed. Reddish hair in a ponytail, fat freckles, a filthy summer dress patterned with pink polka-dots. A doll. An oversized Raggedy Anne come to life. She is, it occurs to me with a flush of shame, a talking, breathing fetish. The Freckled Farmgirl. The Dirty Ragdoll. Something missing in her that has been filled by vaguely sexualized, stock details.

She closes a window on the phone and swings her head around to catch me looking at her. For the first time, her eyes assume a brightness when they meet mine. It makes me feel like she’s caught me in the middle of some lewd act, the indulgence of a private perversion. And her eyes say it’s okay. My secret is safe with her.

“Do you believe in God?” she asks.

A Born Againer. Maybe that’s all this girl is. Just a harmless Bible thumper, thumbing a ride to some revival barbecue up the road. It would explain the flatness of her voice, the eyes at once observing and dim. Her odd, doll-like aspect has been taught. A by-product of faith.

“I don’t know if there’s a God or not,” I answer. “I’ve never seen him if there is.”

She stares. Not off-put by my answer. Just waiting to hear the rest of it.

“But I’ve seen the Devil. And I promise you, he is most definitely real.”

This takes a moment to reach her. Like she’s at the end of a bad long-distance connection, waiting for the meaning to arrive. When it does, she makes the teeth-sucking sound again.

I return my eyes to the road. Correct the leftward drift that has taken the Mustang into the oncoming lane.

“What’s he look like?” she asks.

Like nobody. Like you
, I almost say.

At first, when I feel the warmth in my lap, I think I’ve pissed my pants. Over-tired, too much coffee. An unstoppable flow of heat down my legs.

Yet when I look down expecting to find my jeans darkened, I find the girl’s hand there instead. My fly down. Her hand inside.

“You believe here,” she says, pushing the index finger of her free hand against my temple. Except the voice is no longer the girl’s. It is the voice that came out of Tess’s mouth on the rooftop of the Bauer. At once alive and lifeless.

“Now you must believe
here
,” the Unnamed says.

With that, she squeezes.

I pull her hand out in one yank of her wrist, but it costs a fishtailing turn of the steering wheel, so that the car dodges onto the shoulder before veering hard the other way, waggling across both lanes. To hit the brakes would start a spin, and at this speed—the needle poking against 60 mph—it would likely send us flying off into a passing field. The best thing is to get the car back in line and then slow it down. And I’m managing it, too, letting the girl go so I can return both hands to the wheel, compensating for what the back end of the car wants to do by cutting the other way with the front tires.

We’re just straightening out and I’m putting my foot on the
brakes when the girl clenches her fingernails into the sides of my face. That’s what starts the skid.

Sky.

Asphalt.

Daytime moon.

A spinning, flashing show.

We stop in the middle of the road. If anything comes over the rise ahead it will take us out before it has the chance to slow down.

But the girl is scratching now, screeching and chattering like a rabid animal, like the man in the chair in Venice. I push her against the passenger door and her head cracks against the frame. Not that she feels it. She just lunges at me again. Goes for my eyes.

I swing my fist again and again—half-connecting with her jaw, her ribs, a square shot to her ear. Then, when she appears to be waning, I lean over her legs and open the door.

I’m pulling myself straight when she bites.

A snarling sinking of teeth into the back of my neck. I can’t tell if the scream that follows comes from her or me. The bright shock of pain lends me a seizure of new strength. It’s enough to push the girl out the door, where her ass meets the road with a fleshy slap.

I get back behind the wheel. Slam it into drive.

But the girl comes with me.

In the two seconds it took me to start rolling she must have scrambled up and gripped her hands around the door’s open window. The girl is now being dragged along next to the car. The door swinging out so that she scrapes along the shoulder’s gravel. Then, as it swings closed again, she slams against the side.

The Mustang flies over the rise.

The girl howls.

I let my foot sink the pedal to the floor.

“Please!”

A new voice. Not the false one that belonged to Raggedy Anne, not the Unnamed’s. The girl’s real voice. The one that was hers when she was alive. I’m certain of this. This one word has found its way over the wall of death to ask me for help I cannot give.

It’s an impression confirmed when I turn to look. The girl now being slashed along the side of the car, still holding onto the swinging door. But I don’t slow down. Because she’s already gone. Already his.

“Help me?”

She knows I can’t. A girl who has swum all the way up to the surface only to find a stranger drowning just like she is.

But I reach for her all the same.

And she reaches, too. Releases her left hand from the door handle and throws it over the passenger seat so that it briefly grazes mine. The skin cold as meat taken from the back of the fridge.

Even still, we reach for each other again.

It forces her weight back and the door swings wide. Her legs stream blood as they drag over the asphalt, wildly bouncing like a string of soup cans tied to a
JUST MARRIED!
bumper. She looks at me and, even before she lets go of the door, I see the dimness returning to her eyes. Whoever she was in life slips back underwater. Now there is only this animated puppet, this freckle-cheeked shell.

Then it’s gone.

The nails of one hand scratch against the side of the car, scrabbling to find a hold. A sickening thud as the Mustang’s back wheel rides over her.

I stop.

Jump out of the car and scramble around to the back. Fall to my knees to check under the chassis, peer along the ditches on either side of the road. The girl is nowhere to be seen.

I wipe my hand against the back of my neck and it returns smeared with blood. And the iPhone. Still working. Still holding on to the previous minutes since she’d found the dictaphone app and pressed
RECORD
.

I rewind. Press
PLAY
.

Do you believe in God?

Whoever she was, she was here. Not a part of my mythmaking. Not a delusion. The entire conversation recorded.

 . . . And I promise you, he is most definitely real.

I turn the recording off to avoid hearing the real girl’s call for help, a sound more frightening than even the Unnamed’s hollow tone.

The idea that I should erase the file crosses my mind. It’s what I want to do more than anything else.

Instead I enter a name. Call the file ANNE. Save it.

I
PULL OVER TO SLEEP IN TWENTY-MINUTE BREAKS
. D
RIVE
. S
LEEP
.
Drive. By afternoon I cross the North Dakota state line without anyone noticing. I barely notice it myself.

In Hankinson, after a gummy ham-and-cheese and an entire jug of coffee, I feel pointlessly refreshed. I’m in North Dakota. Now what? Wait for a telegram? Go door to door, flashing open my wallet to the five-year-old photo of Tess within and ask if anyone’s seen my daughter? I can imagine how that would go:

SWEET OLD LADY

Oh dear. How awful. She go missing ’round here?

MAN

No, not here. Venice, actually.

And nobody believes she might be alive except me.

SWEET OLD LADY

I see. And what do you think happened to her?

MAN

Me? I think a demon has her.

SWEET OLD LADY

Henry! Call 911!

SLAM!

The screen door whacks against the MAN’s nose.

He rubs it and walks on as SIRENS approach in the distance.

I decide, having come all this way, to take in Hankinson’s sights. It doesn’t take long. Hot Cakes Café. The Golden Pheasant Bar & Lounge. The Lincoln State Bank. A few white clapboard churches standing well back from the curb. The town’s biggest boast, judging from the paint-chipped signage, is
“OKTOBERFEST
 . . .
IN SEPTEMBER!”
Otherwise no sign of Tess or the Unnamed. No sign of a sign.

When I reach the Hankinson Public Library—a provisional-looking structure of cinderblock and poky windows—I walk in with the idea of taking things into my own hands. I’m a professional researcher, after all. I should be able to find a buried reference, a wink hidden in the text. But what
is
the text? The only book I’m working from is the real world around me. Material I’ve never been particularly good at interpreting.

I acquire a library card for a buck fifty and sign out one of the computer terminals. Figure I might as well begin where all my lazy undergrads embark upon their research papers these days. Google.

“North Dakota” brings up the standard wiki entries about population (672,591, which ranks it forty-seventh among states in density), capital city (Bismarck), sitting senators (one Democrat, one GOP), the highest elevation (at White Butte, which prompts a mental cataloguing of possible puns).

But there is, farther down in the entry, a list of the state’s newspapers.
The
Beulah Beacon
.
Farmers Press
.
McLean County Journal
. And one that jumps out:
Devils Lake Daily Journal
. Is this where I’m supposed to go next? The name fits, though the clue strikes me as rather on-the-nose for the Unnamed, whose character (if it can be understood as
having
character) is emerging as rather more subtle, pleased with its cleverness. So no, I’m not hitting the road to Devils Lake. I’m not hitting the road to anywhere until I discover why I’m here in the first place.

Which may be the point. Perhaps I’m not expected to move, to wander any farther, but to
arrive
.