Demon

  “Sounds like editing.” I chuckled. “My name is Clayton, by the way.”

  “I know,” she said, her hazel gaze leveled upon me.

  “Guardian angel intuition?”

  “No, Clay, because I know everything about you.”

  I hesitated. “You didn’t tell me your name,” I said, slowly.

  “Yes, I did.” She was no longer smiling.

  “You did?” But I knew she hadn’t. Then I saw it: the dark intelligence behind her eyes. Every capillary under my skin bloomed to startled life. She glanced at her wrist; an expensive-looking watch peeked out from beneath her sleeve. “You were early today.”

  My heart beat at my ribs like a cudgel. I flashed back to the office I had left an hour ago, to my hesitation on the street—and the fact that even as I entered the T station I had not known for certain where I was headed. Had she been following me? I didn’t recognize her from the myriad faces I had studied on the train.

  I found myself staring at the copper-haired woman, trying to reconcile what I heard and saw, what I knew to be possible and had formerly thought impossible. I felt fear like a pickax in my gut. “This can’t be real. How can this be real?”

  “This is real. So calm down and listen to me.”

  “I can’t calm down! This can’t be real. No! I refuse to accept it. Who put you up to this? Was it Richard? He has my wife—what more does he want?” I was trembling, my mind splattered in too many directions at once: Richard, Aubrey, the Mediterranean stranger, the dark presence—and now I felt it, as I had in the café—cloaked in the flawless skin before me. “Tell me why you’re doing this!”

  She muttered in a language I didn’t recognize. Suddenly she lunged forward, copper coils splayed over her shoulder, the color at odds with the burgundy of her coat. The effect struck me for an insane moment as one of fire.

  She grabbed my hand. “I told you,” she said, as though I were unintelligent or a child, or both. “To tell you my story.”

  Warmth spread like something injected directly into my bloodstream, creeping up my arm to my shoulder. I tried to pull away, but as in the café three nights ago, the demon’s grip brooked no argument. The warmth spread into my chest. My heart rate slackened. It was still too fast—I don’t think any power could have quelled it in that moment—but even as I thought this, I felt my anxiety, the alarm, the intensity of my fear, smooth out into something more placid. As alert as ever, but at least within my control.

  “I don’t have time for your breakdown, Clay. There are things I need you to know, and at the rate you’re going, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack, and then you won’t be any good to either one of us.” Her voice was as smooth as a hypnotist’s, and I thought again of my theory that this was, in fact, a hoax, that it was merely the power of suggestion working its way through my muscles and veins that even now had relaxed back into the chair.

  Then I remembered that for suggestion to work, the subject had to be willing.

  My gaze dropped to the table, to her hand, holding mine. Ten minutes ago I had considered the possibility of this very circumstance. Now that it had come to pass, though not in any way I might have imagined, something inside me splintered. With the same kind of spontaneous recall with which I had remembered Aubrey and the travel guides, I returned to that night in our apartment when, long after she was asleep, I crept out of bed, careful not to uncover her. And I saw again the e-mail on her account from Richard, a man I didn’t know, saying that he loved her, that he would be thinking of her tomorrow as she told me she was leaving, and that he would be waiting up for her with warm arms afterward. And I knew that night that nothing would ever be the same again.

  I knew the same thing now.

  Were it not for the unnatural tranquility that had probably saved me a public scene here in the bookstore coffee bar, I might have been overcome by the uncontrollable urge to shout like a madman, to lash out at her with a fist, or even to bury my head in my arms and weep.

  But I did none of these things. And the woman—the demon—nodded as though satisfied and let go of my fingers. The calm ebbed, but only slightly, when our contact was broken.

  “Your body simply needs some time to adjust to what your mind now knows. Meanwhile, no, Richard did not send me. He could no sooner send me than he could call down rocks from heaven. I am here of my own volition, and I have much to tell you.”

  “Am I going to hell?” I asked, ashamed at the smallness of my voice. “Is that why you’re here?”

  She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck, rolling her head slightly, in an all-too-human way. “I don’t know the answer to that right now.”

  No comfort there. And while my visceral self had returned to seminormalcy, my mind was as frenetic as before, in ways that would have been impossible had my calm been the result of any conventional means like a drug. I was desperately trying to remember what, if anything, I had learned about demons in eighth-grade confirmation class.

  Something, like a shiny bit of pottery mired in the mud of a shipwreck, caught the eye of memory: Father of Lies.

  “If you’re a demon, why should I believe anything you say?”

  She nodded, making no apparent effort to pass it off. “You raise a very good point. So let’s get this issue of credibility out of the way right now. I won’t waste my time telling you I’m not a liar because that, in itself, would be a lie. But I tell you, lying to you now will not serve my purpose.”

  “What purpose is that? And why should I care or listen to anything you say?”

  “Finally an interesting question!” the demon said with what nearly sounded like relief. “The first answer is that I want to set the record straight. To shatter a few myths about my kind. The second answer is this: because it is a story unlike any other. I believe you’ll find it to be of personal interest.”

  “Why, because I’m a seeker?” I didn’t hold back the bitterness.

  “Because my story is ultimately about you.”

  Something in me recoiled. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  She folded her arms on the edge of the table. “When you were growing up, you honestly believed in the morals of stories, in the integrity of comic-book heroes, of Batman on television, didn’t you? And it had a greater impact on you than having morality drummed into your psyche by a church telling you to please an angry and distant god. You were good on principle. And yet here you are, without a wife or kids, or the success that being good was supposed to win you. Am I right? I know I am. And so you’re on a quest for new meaning because the alternative is only this: that goodness has won you nothing but pain. And you’re not willing to accept that.”

  “No.”

  “You need a sense of context, that larger picture. As I said before, I can give you that. But you have to hear me out.”

  As she said all of this, I found myself drawn to her in a wholly different way than I had before, against judgment, against instinct. And perhaps this was the grandest seduction of it all: that she was right.

  “Don’t worry about anything else. Simply write down what I tell you. Each word. Everything. And then you’ll know it is real and you are sane.”

  “I can’t remember each word. My mind is shattered, can’t you tell?” But even as I said this, I knew I could recite that first conversation verbatim if I wanted to. Even now the full flow of that conversation came over me, as though summoned by the mere act of thinking of it, our exchanges of that night and this one intertwining and overlapping like competing melodies in my mind.

  “You’ll remember.”

  She glanced at her watch and frowned. The ankh swung in the window of her neckline as she gathered her coat. I had been transfixed by that view before, but found I could hardly look at it now.

  She . . . he . . . it left, as it had before, without preamble. I come to you at great risk, Lucian said the first night. What, exactly, had the demon meant by that?

  I SPENT THE NEXT two weeks going through the motions
of a job that seemed suddenly meaningless. I checked the time, the date, my calendar, with a regularity that bordered on obsession. I wrote down and read—and then reread—my accounts of both encounters, though I didn’t need to. As promised, I hadn’t forgotten one word of either. I began to think that this was the real demonic trick: to trap me in this limbo—less dead than before, not quite alive.

  And then the mysterious L appeared again.

  3

  Trying to get away from my home before the appointed time, I noticed the church down the street with new eyes, saw it for perhaps the first time as more than scenery on the way elsewhere. A moment later I was checking the doors—it was Saturday, after all. But they admitted me easily, and I found myself loitering in the narthex until, with great hesitation, I entered the sanctuary.

  I chose a creaky pew toward the back.

  I immediately felt out of place. I hadn’t been to church in years, and then only for holidays or weddings. I was conscious of every sound, of the still postures of those few sitting or kneeling in the pews ahead of me. I wondered if, having been in the presence of a demon, I would conversely better notice the presence of God.

  But I felt nothing.

  In the last week I’d been tempted to search through the boxes remaining in my spare room for my old confirmation certificate. But I couldn’t bear the idea of discovering something of Aubrey’s, of even seeing her writing on the side of the box from the first time it had been used when we moved in together. Ultimately, I decided a weathered certificate would shed light on nothing. Nothing could have prepared me for this. I couldn’t remember Pastor Feagan ever teaching about demons, or even the devil, except in the vaguest terms.

  Not that God had been a specific notion to me, either. God was as real as the gravity on Jupiter or the expansion of the universe. Conceptually significant, yes—especially if one studied astronomy or lived on Jupiter—but nothing I expected to know much about, firsthand, in this world. I had always subscribed to the more modern belief that religion was fraught with contradictions, the product of an overgrown oral tradition that only the fanatical tried to package neatly as one tries to tame kudzu.

  And, as Lucian had aptly observed, I’d never needed religion to be a good person. My father brought that out in me on his own. Never a perfect man, his temper would lie dormant for weeks at a time, waiting to erupt at the first sign of any misdeed or bad grade. Silence was a good sign, no news always the good kind. With an upbringing like that, there had been no need for God

  A stretch of afternoon light angled across several pews as the church door opened. A moment later a black man in a denim jacket entered my pew from the other side and sat down next to me. He smelled like sandalwood and soap. My gaze slid to my watch.

  4:15 p.m.

  “I wondered if you’d be able to walk through the door.” I kept my eyes fixed on the altar, on the cross atop it.

  “Lucifer himself has access to the throne room of God. Do you think a church is any problem for me?” His voice was a warm baritone that did not need whispers to be kept between us.

  “How can that be?”

  “Why would it not be? Neither of us is evil by design.”

  “Because you were angels, you mean.”

  “I was. Lucifer is a cherub.”

  With some confusion I conjured chubby-winged children in diapers and practically heard his answering scowl. “It isn’t what you’re thinking,” he said, more loudly than before. “The cherubim are the highest of our order, the most powerful of us all. Know that on Lucifer’s creation, El called him perfect.”

  I turned toward him, openly studying him now. He had a broad forehead and long, high cheekbones. The angular lines of a short moustache exactly delineated the curve of his upper lip, which was perfectly matched to the lower one. A hint of stubble smattered his chin and neck, like lichen growing on a great, smooth stone.

  “He called him perfect with good reason. Lucifer was his masterwork. He was powerful, anointed by God, and so very beautiful.”

  I thought I heard him sigh.

  “Then what about seraphim?” I asked, not because of any spectacular knowledge of my own, but according to literary lore, CHERUBIM and SERAPHIM had once been the license plates on Anne Rice’s two limousines.

  “The seraphim are fearsome fighters, but the cherubim outrank them. And then there are the archangels. You’ve heard of Gabriel and Michael—”

  There was a slight, just-perceptible intonation to his words when he spoke these names, as well as the name of Lucifer, and even his own name. Not quite an accent, it was more an elongation on the tongue, as though the pure names in another language might be unpronounceable in ours. Hearing it now, I remembered it in the speech of the woman in the bookstore and of the man in the café.

  “I won’t go into detail about all the various kinds of cherubim and seraphim. It may be best that I not describe them, lest, with all those faces and wings, you think us a spiritual freak show.”

  Beyond his profile, a stained-glass saint stared out upon us both with hollow, fractured eyes. “And you? What about you?”

  “Ah, me.” He spread his hands on his lap. They were lighter colored on the inside, the creases in them dark. The calluses on his palms struck me as aberrant. A stainless-steel watch peered beneath the edge of his cuff. “I was a member of the Host. A shining light, mere and marvelous.”

  “How did it happen then—your change, I mean?” The question tasted surreal on my lips.

  Lucian reached up to rub the back of his neck. I had seen Sheila do the same at the onset of her migraines. “I should tell that story from the beginning. But this place isn’t conducive to talking.”

  “Because of the crosses?”

  “No, because the praying of those people is giving me a headache.”

  “The crosses don’t bother you?”

  “They should bother you a great deal more. They were used to kill humans.”

  I had not thought of that.

  “Stay if you like, but I’m going.” He rose and moved down the length of the pew to the side aisle where he’d entered. Two weeks ago I would have gladly let him go. I would have camped out, in fact, in the front pew and inquired about moving in. But now I needed to know what this, any of this, had to do with me.

  This, the question that had niggled at me these last two weeks, was helped not at all by his cryptic answers.

  We stepped out, blinking, into the cold afternoon light. Now I could see the wiry gray hairs above his ears, the dark spots dotting his cheeks, betraying his age. He had a presence about him, an unflappability that I found slightly unsettling. He was casually dressed, his pants not dissimilar to mine that day in the bookstore, albeit softer around the knees. To any other eye he might have been a local academic out for a casual weekend. An accountant on his day off. A tourist.

  “So you popped up from hell to meet me in church.” I shoved my hands into my pockets.

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “To church?”

  “To hell.”

  I squinted at him.

  “You’ve got so much of this wrong, Clay. Your conventional wisdom lacks one thing: wisdom. None of us have been to hell.”

  “So it doesn’t really exist.”

  “Not now, no.”

  “So you mean you haven’t been to hell yet.”

  He flashed me such a baleful glance that my heart tripped in my chest. I started down the street, stiffly, my shoulders having risen toward my ears in the chill. A moment later, the demon fell into step beside me.

  “To begin my story I should say that my beginning predates yours by a brief infinity.”

  “You’re not making sense.” I didn’t look at him.

  “The beginning of the world is only the beginning of time. Your Scriptures, being written for your benefit, begin at the point where you enter history. But my beginning came long before.”

  “In heaven, I suppose.”

  “No, Eden.”
br />   “What, the garden of Eden?”

  “Yes. That garden, the green one, was in Eden. And Eden is here. This.” He spread his hands out toward the expanse of sidewalk in front of us. “Eden preexisted that garden and the first of your kind. It was Lucifer’s—and my—home first.”

  I raised my brows.

  “What—you thought the world was full of nothingness before your creation?” He gave a short laugh. “Rather ethnocentric of you, isn’t it? Do you believe the earth is flat, too? Listen to me: Elohim created Eden. He also created us. And that includes Lucifer—which is important because no creation is equal to the creator. What that means for you is that, contrary to popular myth, Lucifer is no evil opposite of God.”

  “I thought Lucifer was God’s nemesis.”

  He stopped. “Clay, for this to work you have to let go of that. This is not your so-called classic human tale of the struggle between good and evil. Hades, but you humans always have a way of distorting the truth into something utterly simplistic and banal—not to mention trite.”

  We walked again, and for several moments there was nothing but the steady sound of our heels on the sidewalk and the occasional brittle leaf that skittered across it, joined from time to time by the orphaned bits of conversations from passing pedestrians and the cars on Massachusetts Avenue. In the distance a church bell chimed the half hour.

  At length he said, “Elohim was my god before you ever existed. We called him that—‘Mighty God and Creator’—though the name implies so much more. I say this for you because the fearful names we have known since those first days cannot be formed by human tongues.”

  I thought again of the barely perceptible lilt of his words that I had noticed earlier.

  “El made a garden in Eden and lavished Lucifer with everything—all government, total power. He lived there like a favorite first son, the hawk to our sparrows, the jewel to our quartz.”

  “So why did he make you? Especially if he knew you would turn out . . . like this.”

  “I could ask you the same thing.” But he didn’t. “Why El made us, I’ve never known. One could surmise that El was lonely, but the fact is that he didn’t really need us. You, created in his image, might actually have more insight into that question than I do. We’re not so privileged as you in that way. As for me, my purpose for living, my role in this great scheme was clear to me from the first: to fall down, to worship, to praise, to wait upon the word of El.”