The Demonologist (20 page)

“Why would you wish for an accident?”

“So I could be alone for once! Not one half of a whole, not what folks called us all our lives. Not the Terrible Twosome or the Reyes Twins or The Girls. Just myself.” She swallows, but she goes on without clearing her throat, so that her voice is even quieter. “I prayed. But heaven never did a thing. So then I started praying the other way. This time, something answered.”

“We should go now,” I say.

“Go? Why?”

“Your sister came home. Remember?”

“I killed my sister.”

“No, Delia. She’s okay.”

The old woman shakes her head. “I killed her.”

“But I was just talking to her upstairs. Paula’s not missing anymore. She’s here.”

“That . . .
thing
. That’s not Paula.”

“Who is it?”

“The one who answered my prayer.”

The old woman lifts her hand to point at a place over my shoulder in the darkness behind me.

There is no choice in it. I can’t let there be a choice in it.

I turn from her and move forward with my own shadow cast ahead of me as another layer of dark. I keep my hands raised so they might catch hold of the other bulb’s string hanging down from its switch. Just when it feels like I’ve gone too far it tickles over my cheeks. My fingers follow it up to the bulb. Screw it in tight. The heat tells me it’s back on before the revelation of its light.

The sisters sit side by side in the corner. Their backs against the far wall, at the edge of the light’s reach, so that their faces are illuminated but only dimly so. It is enough to see that they are real. That the shotgun lying across Delia’s lap, the dark, fresh wet against the bricks from the exit wound at the back of her head, the gaping mouth
where the barrel had been placed, is real. That Paula’s remains, speckled from the dirt that clings to her, the root-ends and pebbles from the ground she’d been dug up from, the skin purpled with bloat, is real.

There is a handful of seconds between the apprehension of this image and the first grappling with what it means. And it is in this time of the brain rushing to catch up that the rest of the body jumps ahead. It swings me around. Prevents me from being sick right here right now.

“Why did you bring her here?” I ask Delia, who now sits rubbing a knuckle under her glistening, running nose.

“It asked me to.”

“Tell me its name.”

“Doesn’t have one.”

“They’ll think you did it.”

“I did do it.”

“It told you to.”

“It told me I
could
.”

“But everything you’ve said to me—the thing I spoke to upstairs, your prayers—nobody will ever know.”

“You know.”

Now it’s the other bulb’s turn to flicker and extinguish. The Delia I have been speaking to returns to darkness.

“You know you’ll kill, too, don’t you?” she says, much closer now.

“No . . . ”

“That’s what it wants. For you to know what it does. To show how you can do it, too. For you to believe. To kill.”

The old woman is so close I can read the outline of her face inches from mine even in the darkness. The stained ivory of her smile.

“Someone close,” she whispers.

I step backward and start up the stairs. Slowly at first, making sure of my footing on the narrow steps. Then running for the top, my breath a labored heave in my own ears. Bounding through the kitchen—the single coffee cup still there, the chair empty—and out the door to my car.

I peel out of the farmhouse’s yard and gun it down the lane to the road, slapping at the wheel to make the turn and knocking against the
REYES
mailbox post with my bumper as I go. The mailbox pops its door open, so that when I glance back at it a couple hundred yards on it looks like a stooped figure lurching after me, its mouth wide in a scream.

I
DRIVE SOUTH.
I
T SEEMS LIKE THE LEAST PREDICTABLE DIRECTION.
East is where I’m from, the logical direction of retreat. And north is Canada. Not a desirable option for me. I left there a long time ago in the name of drawing a line between what I came from and what I could reinvent myself as being. I’ve got enough on my hands at the moment as far as spirits go without some long-buried ghosts wriggling up for a visit.

So farewell North Dakota, hello South Dakota. Just when I’m thinking there’s never been a less necessary reason for a border, I roll into Nebraska, which looks more like North Dakota than North Dakota. Finally, Kansas. Not especially distinct from the previous states but with a whiff of fame about it, Dorothy and Toto and mobile home parks flattened by twisters. There is something, too, about the look of the fields (or the look of the day) that reminds me of the crop duster sequence from Hitchcock’s
North by Northwest
. Cary Grant ducking from the plane’s buzzing attacks, wondering what the hell he’d been dragged into. One of O’Brien’s favorites.

And now, all at once, the thought of her clenches at my heart. How much I miss her. How a drive across the flats can double the loneliness of an already lonely journey.

How terribly, unshakably frightened I am.

T
HE ROAD CAN WIPE THE MIND CLEAN.
I
T CAN ALSO PULL UP MEMORIES
at random, disordered and careless, throwing them against the windshield so hard you jump back in your seat at the impact.

Just now, for instance. My first camping trip with Tess.

Diane wasn’t much for what she called the “out-of-doors.” It left me alone to drive up into the Adirondacks with Tess when she was five so that I could teach her some of the skills I’d learned in my northern Ontario youth: building a fire, storing food up a tree to keep out of the reach of bears, the wrist-turn required for a smooth J-stroke.

On the drive we played I Spy and co-composed some of the naughty limericks Diane forbade at home (
There once was a girl named Dotty / Who tooted when she sat on the potty
). The truth is I was worried the whole way up. About rain, about mosquitoes, about
not having fun
. Tess being a born New Yorker, I didn’t want her to be freaked out by all the discomforts encountered over a couple nights in the woods. More than this, I didn’t want to fail. To return home with a kid blotchy with poison ivy and promises from her father to never try
that
again.

Instead, we had a great time. Butterflies that landed on Tess’s shoes after she stood as still as a statue for almost an hour in a blueberry patch, pretending to be “a giant flower” until the Monarchs fluttered close, trusting her. Night swims in the lake, the movement of our bodies twisting the reflected moon over the still surface. Perfecting the stick rotation required for evenly roasted marshmallows.

Though all of this comes back to me later. After the memory that has me coughing for air as I drive through the endless fields.

After our second day, Tess asked that I wake her up in the middle of the night so that she could see what I described to her as “the real stars.” She didn’t believe my talk of the Milky Way, of skies where the
needlepoint of light matched the dark. I set my watch for three
AM
. When the time came we unzipped the tent and stood in the middle of our campsite, tilting back our heads. The dome of sky ablaze.

Neither of us spoke. Just returned to the tent after a while, went back to sleep. And in the morning, we woke at the exact same time. Looked at each other and started to laugh. Not a laugh
at
or
about
anything. Not a silently shared thought. Just the two of us meeting the dawn with spontaneous gratitude.

This is what nearly pulls me over to get my breath back and stop my hands from shaking on the wheel: I remember, even as the moment was happening, having the clear thought that
This is the happiest you have ever been
.

And it was.

Still is.

A
N HOUR OUTSIDE
W
ICHITA
I
STOP AT A SERVICE STATION AND STEP
into a phone booth that smells of mustard and fart.

“Look at me,” O’Brien says when she picks up. “Sitting by the phone like a teenager without a date for the prom.”

“Would you come to the prom with me, Elaine?”

“Not a chance. I’m never forgiving you.”

“Why not?”

“You haven’t called, nimrod.”

“Been a while since I’ve been called that.”

“Really? Then let’s make up for lost time. Where are you, nimrod?”

“Kansas.”

“Where in Kansas?”

“Just outside Wichita. Probably stay there tonight. I passed a billboard for the Scotsman Inn a couple miles back. Figure I’ll check out their haggis.”

“Haggis in Kansas.”

“Say
that
three times fast.”

“How did things go in North Dakota?”

Fine, I guess. Spoke to a demon in the form of a dead old woman, followed by a
conversation with her twin sister’s ghost. Was the first to discover the remains of their real-life murder-suicide, then ran away without calling the authorities. Oh, and a hit man—or something like a hit man—is after me because he thinks I possess evidence incontrovertibly proving the existence of demons. Which I do.

“Weird,” I say.

“Was more . . . revealed to you?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Like what?”

Like the demon I’m trying to find needs me as a witness to his influence in human affairs. He needs me as an apostle.

“I’m not sure you’d understand,” I say.

“Try me.”

“I think Tess is trying to reach me as much as I’m trying to reach her.”

“Okay. That’s good, right?”

“Unless I can’t get to her.”

A silence as we both weigh the meaning of this.

“Anything else?” she asks finally.

“I think I’ve been shown how the presence—how the Unnamed—works. It looks for a door, a way into your heart. Sadness. Grief. Jealousy. Melancholy. It finds an opening and enters.”

“Demons afflict the weak.”

“Or the ones who ask for help without caring who’s ready to give it.”

“Then what?”

“It breaks down the wall between what you can imagine doing and what you would never do.”

“You realize you’ve just described your own situation, don’t you?”

“How you figure that?”

“A man in grief. Now doing something he would never normally do.”

“Doesn’t quite apply to my case.”

“And the distinction is—”

“The Unnamed doesn’t want to possess me. He wants me—or at least the better part of me—to remain myself.”

“To what end?”

“That I don’t entirely know yet.”

“Okay,” O’Brien says with an audible gulp of breath.

“There’s something else.”

“Shoot.”

“I’m right.”

“About what?”

“Everything. I’m even more certain that although the things happening around me are insane,
I’m
not insane.”

“Delusions alone don’t make you insane.”

“Maybe not. But
I
thought I was. Until now.” I take a breath. It brings the fatigue into my bones all at once, so that I plant my hand against the booth’s glass for balance. “I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go next.”

“You’re waiting for a sign.”

“You could at least try to hide your sarcasm.”

“I’m not sarcastic. It’s just hard to talk about this stuff without unintentionally
sounding
sarcastic.”

A pause. When O’Brien speaks next her snappy banter is replaced by her doctor voice. If she can’t make fun of me for even a full minute, I must be in worse shape than I thought.

“You sound broken, David.”

“I
am
broken.”

“Do you think it might be a good idea to hold off on this quest thing for a while? Get some rest? Regroup?”

“That might make sense if I had any regard whatsoever for my own well-being, but I don’t. I’m holding on to the end of a frayed string out here. And I can’t let go of it.”

“Even if it leads you somewhere bad?”

“It already has.”

Outside the phone booth, cars roll in and out of the lot. All of their drivers throwing glances my way. Me, a guy in need of a shave talking on a pay phone. Only five years ago I’d appear as a harried salesman putting in a long-distance call to his wife. Now, in the age of the cell, I’m a possibly-criminal curiosity. A middle-class crackhead looking to buy. A john arranging a date. A homegrown terrorist.

“There are things in this world most of us never see,” I find
myself saying. “We’ve trained ourselves not to see them, or try to
pretend
we didn’t if we do. But there’s a reason why, no matter how sophisticated or primitive, every religion has demons. Some faiths may have angels, some may not. A God, gods, Jesus, prophets—the figure of ultimate authority is variable. There are many different kinds of creators. But the destroyer always takes the same essential form. Man’s progress has, from the beginning, been thwarted by testers, liars, defilers. Authors of plague, madness, despair. The demonic is the one true universal across all human religious experience.”

“That may be true, as far as anthropological observation goes.”

“It’s true because it’s so pervasive. Why this one shared aspect of belief for so many, for so long? Why is demonology more common than reincarnation, more than sacrificial offerings, more than the way we pray or the houses of worship where we congregate or the form the apocalypse will take at the end of time?
Because demons exist
. Not as an idea but here, on the ground, in the everyday world.”

My breath catches in my throat, and I realize I’m panting like I’ve just come up for air. And the whole time O’Brien says nothing. It’s impossible to say if it’s due to the digestion of what I’ve said, or alarm at recognizing how far gone I am. There is a quality to the silence that makes it clear I’ve either won her or lost her in the last minute.

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” she says eventually.

“Likewise. How are you feeling?”

“Sore. A bit pukey. It’s like a hangover more than anything. A chronic hangover without the fun of the night before.”