Demon

  Meanwhile, the attention I’d focused on when and where Lucian might show up and on writing the account was giving way to my growing fixation on how the account would end and whether our strange relationship would end with it. Would he disappear from my life once his precious story was published?

  The thought brought me no peace.

  Lucian locked his fingers behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “Lucifer failed.” He sighed. “I was confused. Nothing about this made sense to me, and my lack of answers only unsettled me more.”

  I knew that feeling. “What were you unsettled about?”

  “Everything.” He shook his head, the boyish curls brushing against the thick cords of his neck. “This God-man, this aspect of the Almighty in the body of a mortal, this Messiah, went about his business in exceedingly unsavory conditions. I mean, he hung out with whores and extortionists. I was flummoxed. Having gone to the trouble of becoming human, why not choose better company? Why not announce it with fanfare? A little panache? Hades. Why not awe the masses? This was the creator of the universe, after all.” He threw his arms up.

  “What did it matter to you?” I scooped couscous onto my fork.

  “It galled me, the way people treated him—not because I wanted to see him welcomed or worshipped, certainly, but for the sheer fact of who I knew him to be.”

  Like so much of Lucian’s account, it was something I had not thought about. The story of Christ was such a cultural fixture, such a central theme throughout history that I had never dwelled on these details.

  “He had more coming. I simply didn’t see it yet.” He lowered his chin, studied the zipper dangling from the neck of his polar fleece. “He performed a few miracles at least. It was something. Still, I came away disappointed, waiting for more. This was Elohim, the Alpha and Omega!”

  “More, such as?”

  “A mass-healing. Something.” He lifted his head and rubbed his goatee, his mouth slack. “Even your televangelists purport to do that much. But this was El. He could have reshaped the earth, restored Eden, shown even a portion of that terrible power that had spoken the green and wild earth into existence. He could have restored the humans to their original state. Hadn’t he come to save them, after all? They were uninspiring creatures to begin with, but at least he could have done that much.”

  “Why do you think he didn’t?”

  Lucian’s face went blank, “He seemed more interested in restoring individuals. I didn’t understand it. Why mend one vessel when the rest are cracking all around you? Why mend one when the rest don’t even like you?” He laughed. “But it got stranger: The priests of El himself called him a blasphemer and claimed he derived his powers from us.”

  I wondered where I had missed all of this, growing up. How pale, how superficial and ritualistic, had been my early experience with the church and their packaged God.

  “As though our powers could compare. It was too ridiculous. El was humiliating himself and getting spat on for his efforts. And I came to think that now, at last, he would experience firsthand the misery of this mud race, and that in this way he deserved it. Still, as I look back on the hatred, the scoffing, the pointed fingers, I don’t know how he stood it.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “Because he went against the religious establishment!” He laughed, the chords dancing in his thick neck, the sound of it arcing up now beyond his earlier chuckles to an octave it should not have reached, rankling. The man in the apron behind the café counter glanced our way. I was prepared for the instant composition of the demon’s features but not for the haunted look that crept into them.

  “Lucifer, for his part, wasn’t happy about having this walking testament of his failure roaming the earth, embarrassing him. And something began to happen with him. His luminescent eyes turned shifty. He raged as he had not since the new Eden. We avoided him, entertaining ourselves with all the usual things—the running of his earthly government, temptation of the faithful—in hopes of raising his spirits. But he paced and stalked, and followed this Jesus wherever he went. He was obsessed, filled with loathing yet unable to stay away from him.”

  I piled crumpled napkin and plastic silverware on my plate. “How long did that go on?”

  “Several years. Then, in the space of one night, everything changed.

  “It was Passover, and though Jews knew it as the saving of the firstborn by the lamb’s blood upon the doorframe, it will always be, to my mind, the thwarting of a perfectly good mass killing.”

  I stared at him.

  “That night the God-man did a strange thing. He broke bread with his followers, saying it was his body, and he gave it to them. He gave them wine, saying it was his blood. But then he said something that chilled my immortal heart—now mark me well—he said it was spilled for them in a new covenant for the forgiveness of sins. Do you hear this? Do you understand it?” He leapt to his feet, pacing several steps away and back, not waiting for my answer. “Pardon my human reaction: my skin crawled.”

  He sat down again and leaned over the table, closer to my face than I liked. “We had waited an epoch for El to do away with these people, to, in the very least, give them their due condemnation. If we, glorious creatures, had fallen so far from favor, then we would never stand by and willingly allow these clay people—these humans—to replace us in his affections. Never.”

  The hairs along my neck stood on end.

  “But those words spoken over the Passover table sounded with the hollow echo of a vault, sealing for eternity. As the first words of your creation had been full and pregnant, these rang now with the harsh sentence of exclusion, finality, and damnation.”

  “Maybe the forgiveness was for you, too.”

  He laughed, and this time the sound was low like thunder tumbling beyond the horizon.

  “You are so blind, Clay.”

  For a long moment we stared at one another, and I felt the gulf between us as I had never felt it before, as one breed considers the other, and his own mortality with it, knowing that he will be surpassed and survived by the other, that the other has unwittingly succeeded him.

  “With sickened sense I saw it all,” he said softly, his expression expansive, eyes slightly widened. “They were going to kill him. It didn’t matter that he was innocent. It didn’t matter that his trial wasn’t even legal. It was a fiasco, politics and government being the twin playgrounds of Satan. It didn’t even matter that he was God. It was an appalling thought, the created killing the Creator. It went against every natural law.”

  The tinge to his voice was not sympathy or horror but a strange brand of wonder.

  “But Satan was out of control. The danger ran off his back like so much rainwater on slick and well-oiled feathers. El would not bend to the temptation of his flesh. Well then, let him suffer in it! More, the God-man would suffer by the hands of the people he insisted on submitting to, these miserable clay creatures that he loved so dearly—and he would suffer greatly. Our prince rose up with a glamour to blot out the sun and roared, Let him see how they love him in return!”

  “Are you saying you didn’t want that, too?”

  “Oh, I did. But this was error, this was folly. I saw too clearly the God-man’s refusal of temptation, the immaculate life, saw in him the image of the Passover lamb. I raised my arms, my voice, took to wing, frantic for it to stop. I understood what was happening, and it had to stop—abruptly, violently, by any means, any force. But there was no one to hear me in the roar of voices both human and angelic. Lucifer and all my blind sibling minions were mad, frenzied as berserkers before a battle, intent on hauling this Jesus to the cross like a child before a runaway train.” He rubbed his forehead. “I saw it,” he said faintly. “I saw it coming. But I was only one being. I could do nothing.”

  “You didn’t want to kill him,” I said, incredulous.

  “Oh”—and now his lips glistened—“a part of me wanted him laid open, flayed apart, rent in ways that humans were not meant t
o suffer and survive. And I reveled in the sight of his suffering. I wanted it, I lusted for it. But even then I knew it for seduction. And as I saw the blood running from his back and his arms and down his legs and into the ground . . . ”

  It was unsettling, seeing him like this. He was normally so cocksure, so arrogant. “What? What was it?”

  He pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead. “I wished I had no foresight. For the first time in my life, ignorance would have been a mercy to me. Then I might have enjoyed our triumph, the sweetness of that moment.” He rubbed his brows, pinched the bridge of his nose. “But El bore it all. As he had borne the ruin of Eden and the faithlessness of the humans before, with the same suffering with which he had wept down the skies onto the mud race he loved, he bore it. It was awful to me, the submission of Elohim to the murderous hands of his creatures.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The spilling of blood—it was the spilling of blood.” His voice cracked.

  “Why do you keep saying that? What was it about the blood?”

  “Idiot!” He was on his feet, walking away so that I stared after him—as did others in the café, heads snapping up from their companions and laptops. I started to rise, but he came striding back, shoved his weight into the chair and leaned over the table until it creaked and threatened to tip. His hair was disheveled, his skullcap missing. He wiped a hand over his beard and blurted, “Passover! The Passover lamb!” He was beyond himself, and I searched for something to say to calm him down. The man at the café counter was tense, and I knew we were on the verge of being told to leave.

  “Death had come to every firstborn in Egypt—animal, king, slave—except in the homes of those Israelites who had painted the blood of perfect lambs on their doors. Death passed over those doors. Now here it was, running down the legs and arms of that God-man, the blood like that of those perfect lambs, their veins drained into basins, that vital, crimson reparation, the blood of atonement, once smeared on the doorframes of the Passover . . . now etched on the heart of man.”

  I had heard the phrase “Lamb of God” in hymns. I had heard the Jesus freaks saying he died for their sins. I had never understood what they meant.

  Until now.

  “I howled a banshee cry, but it was too late. They did the unspeakable. They hauled him off to a public execution. In my ears and all around me was the motley fervor of Legion. And Satan had eyes for nothing but the son—that part of Elohim that had formed the cosmos and reshaped the terra and, most importantly, refused him—broken, as wretched as a human can be before a mortal body cries out, too broken to hold its own spirit.”

  I remembered the broken body of the jogger, cracked beyond life.

  “‘It is done,’ he said. And I thought, Yes. It is. And the hourglass that had come into existence for me on that first day when time was created, that had signaled the measure of time until an unknown and inevitable end, was jolted, a wealth of sand—precious grains of limited time—tumbling through that channel, gone forever. I felt I could gather the crumbs of my future in one palm.”

  I saw now the rugged, multidial watch on his wrist, time in all its measurements, time measured and captured, no farther than arm’s length. Time, owned and on occasion even stopped in the mechanism of that fine chronograph.

  “Yes. Now you understand. And there it is.” The watch was frozen, the second hand in mid-stutter, unmoving.

  “As he died, I felt it—his departure, though I had become accustomed to the sense of him here, moving about the earth as flesh, and I had become numbed to it, too. The effect was that while I did not feel with acute awareness his presence here, I felt acutely the moment he departed. Felt it more deeply than the mortals who fell back as the sky went black. And when it did, I, without corporeal body, shivered, felt in my bones El’s withdrawal from that place, like the sun fleeing a wasteland of ice.

  “Around me, my comrades fell silent one by one, cries dying on their lips, giving way to a shifting, uneasy silence. I wanted to strike them all! What did they think would happen? Had no one listened, no one heard? But they had been caught up in their bloodlust, fueled by the rage and fervor of Lucifer even as Lucifer had surely come to the same realization as I had, too late. And now that it was done, as the broken body that barely resembled a body except in the most macabre of ways hung limply upon that tree, all we could do was stand and look on at the wreck of our design.

  “That moment was, in all, the eeriest moment of my life since the day Lucifer’s throne careened from violent, heaven-hungry hands, since the night darkness consumed Eden and water swallowed the earth.”

  I was silent. I had questions. But there was a hollowness in his eyes that made the dark light inside them look like twin black holes. I looked away from him, taking in the little tables, the people hunched over their laptops, their sandwiches and lattes—needing the comfort of their preoccupation, to hear the sound of the coffee machine, to regain the present. I did it in the way that one comes out of a theater, blinking in the light after a matinee horror movie, glad for the sun, the sound of the cars on the street. But Lucian pulled me back, and again I thought his eyes looked like holes.

  “This was more than the shattering of ambition, of any last shred of our hope, however twisted and dark. This was what it meant to be damned. This was what it felt like to know that one already was—had been for eons—damned. Gall rose inside me, acrid and virulent. Terror beat at my heart. I writhed, grasping for some kind of resolution. I couldn’t stand it. I hinged on madness. I craved malice, rage, the sound of Lucifer, our prince—the majestic Satan—howling his indignation, lashing out. Anything but this.”

  “And did he?” My voice sounded too loud, too crude, too human.

  “Just as he had led us nowhere when Eden went black, he led us nowhere now. He did nothing. Our general, our prince stared on in silence. And what could I do but wonder at this new sense of the inevitable, this dread embalming my spirit? All was not well with me. All was not well.”

  His head snapped up toward the entrance of the store, and he straightened as though startled.

  “What? What is it?” I twisted, trying to see what it was, but a thick grocery aisle blocked my view. Lucian craned his thick neck, as though to stare straight through it.

  “We don’t have much time.”

  “You’ve said that since our first appointment.”

  “No.” He snapped his gaze to me and pushed his chair back with a skid against the tiles. “It’s getting shorter.”

  It chilled me, the way he left, taking a long side aisle toward the door. I got up, made a show of throwing my plate and juice bottle away, tried to see who might have alarmed him so much. But there was no one in the store entrance or even down the middle aisle and only one patron in each of the three checkout lanes.

  I loitered near the front of the store as cashiers scanned containers of rice chips and vegetable broth, of soy yogurt and tofu ice cream, each item registering with an electronic blip. Frustrated by Lucian’s erratic behavior and uncharacteristic display of emotion, I left.

  Fewer than five steps beyond the door, I ran into Mrs. Russo. She was wrapped up in her camel coat and carried her canvas shopping bag. Running into her shouldn’t have seemed odd. She was, after all, the one who had told me about the co-op when I first moved in.

  “Well, Clay! Hello dear!” She clasped me by the arm with a gloved hand, and I tried to smile. “Did you come for some nice lunch?”

  “I did. Wild salmon and broccolini.” As I said it, my mind began to exercise a strange new thought.

  “Oh, delicious. I might have to have some, too. It’s a pity you’ve already eaten, or you could join me.” She smiled, and I felt caught between wanting to pull away and longing to sit down with her over a plate of her famous lemon bars. There was something comforting about her presence, as though no harm could possibly come to me as long as one was with her.

  “We’ll have lunch together another time, Mrs. Russo. H
ave you just come from church by chance?” By way of explanation, I added, “You look so nice.”

  “No, dear. I’m meeting my small group tonight though. Is everything all right? You’ve been on my heart so much.”

  There was a time when I’d found her religiousness the only irritating thing about her, when I’d been as leery of her invitations to church or Bible group as I was of Amway. But now I bit my lip, feeling as if a wall that had both protected and alienated me might crack. “Everything’s all right.”

  “If you need anything, you let me know. Don’t you ever feel silly asking.” There was a steeliness I had never seen in her before. And in that moment I thought she would have defended me to the death had she needed to. Not knowing what to say, I found myself fighting a wave of emotion, the product, I was sure, of exhaustion. I was so tired, in fact, that for a moment I thought I saw in her eyes an acumen as discerning as the intelligence in Lucian’s was strange.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER TRANSCRIBING the strange interaction in the co-op, I tried to read one of my newly acquired manuscripts but was unable to concentrate.

  Why was our time getting shorter? Did he mean that we were nearing the end of his story, or had something happened? Regardless of the reason, I should have been happier than I was—soon I might be free of him. I would have what I needed to finish the manuscript. And once it was published, I could get on with my life.

  But I was unsettled by Lucian’s distraction, disturbed that I could not pinpoint a reason for it. I had never seen him so emotional or emotionally at a loss. And to see him flee the co-op . . .

  What could possibly compel a demon to flee?

  The kindly face of Mrs. Russo floated before my mind.

  SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT MY inbox chimed. It could have been incoming spam or a note from one of my authors—some of whom I secretly believed never slept. It might have been from Katrina, whom I had known to work through the night and half suspected of being a day-walking vampire. It could even have been a note from my sister, with whom I had had only sporadic contact since her insinuation that I had driven my wife away.