The Demonologist (24 page)

“On the contrary.”

“Really? I’m not hideous?”

“I think you’re lovely.”

“Then make love to me.”

“I don’t—”

“I might not be able to tomorrow. You might not want to,” she says, as though reading my mind’s assessment of a moment ago.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Think about what we’re after out here, David. What’s after us. If we’re anything at all, it’s two people who have left being sure of things behind.”

“Elaine—”

“Don’t think about it. Don’t
Elaine
me. Just come here.”

She opens her arms and then I’m in them. Kissing her cheek. Holding her against me in an embrace she pushes away from because it’s too much like what we’ve done before, the tender but polite contact with which we would conclude our evenings out in New York. She wants this to be different. So she unbuckles my belt, pops the button. Slides her hand down.

“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay. That’s
good
.”

She clicks off the light and pulls me down onto the bed. Taking off my clothes more expertly than I could manage it myself. Then it’s my turn.

Her skin cool and tasting of grass and, more faintly, lemon zest. She is a woman I know so well and yet now, instantly, not at all. A thrilling stranger. A tumbling discovery of new gestures, new ways of pleasing and being pleased.

She directs me onto my back and straddles my thighs, working her way up, stroking me with both her hands. Readying me.

All along we have been so close that there has been nothing to see but O’Brien’s eyes, her face, her body. But now that she is sitting up, the room is partly visible again.

And there is something here that wasn’t here before.

A darker shade of black than the rest of the room’s shadow that surrounds O’Brien like an aura. Yet, without any light except whatever trickles in through the curtains and under the door, she could not possibly cast any shade herself. It’s not a shadow, then, but something
made
of shadow. Standing at the foot of the bed directly behind her.

As she rises, it moves. Takes a single sideways step to show the profile of its face. A man looking down at something a short distance off, transfixed. Unmoving except for the recent exertions of his trembling arms. He could be calculating a loss, he could be awaiting further direction. The whites of his eyes casting their own dim illumination, revealing the water dripping off his chin, his matted hair. The mouth and nose recognizable, in their handed-down shape, as my own.

Dad?

I don’t say this aloud. But I hear it. My voice at six years old, uttering the same word—spoken with the same immeasurable puzzlement—I did the day Lawrence drowned. My father, too late to save him, standing in the water just as he stands waist-deep in shadow in this room.

“David?”

O’Brien kneeling over me, her breath now slowed. Her look of concern becoming something else as she sees my own expression change. The horror I felt as a child when my father turned to me on the day my brother died and I saw a stranger.

Just as that stranger turns to me now.

NO!

I push O’Brien off me and she lands on her side, gripping the fitted sheet to stop her from falling over the edge.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you see him?” I ask, eyes closed but pointing to where my father stood.

“See who?” O’Brien flicks on the bedside lamp. “There’s nobody there.”

“My
father
was here,” I tell her after opening my eyes to confirm he’s gone.

“It’s okay. We’re safe now.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

O’Brien puts her T-shirt back on. Stands in the same place my father stood a moment ago.

“Toss me that, would you?” she asks, pointing to my
Paradise Lost
on the table. I throw it to her and, as it flies, the pages flap like panicked wings. Even when she catches it the book seems agitated in her hands, the cover flapping open every moment it’s not pressed shut, so that it appears like a mouth gasping for air.

O’Brien heads into the bathroom. As she goes she reaches her hand out against the wall for balance.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” she says, not sounding fine. “Just need to pee.”

“And you’re taking that with you for some light reading?”

“Want to see what all the hype’s about.”

She swings the door closed behind her. Before it closes, I catch a glimpse of her in the mirror. I’m expecting to see disappointment at our failure.
My
failure. Or maybe frustration at where we’ve found ourselves, how she’s let herself be talked into a situation that, if it wasn’t me, and if her days weren’t so sparsely numbered, she would have avoided. Instead, I see that she is scared. She doesn’t need to go to the bathroom. It is her fear she doesn’t want me to see.

Almost right away I hear her crying. I’ve never known O’Brien to make such sounds, and it takes a moment to confirm this is what she’s doing. Snuffling gasps and little chokes like a drowning swimmer pulled from the water.

“How you doing in there?” I ask when I go to stand outside the door.

“Look at me. I’m like a girl who’s lost her virginity at a rec-room party.”

“Technically, we didn’t do it.”

“And technically I’m not a virgin.”

“Ah. An analogy, then.”

“Thought you might be familiar with those.”

“Can I come in?”

“You bringing your dad with you?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Then sure.”

O’Brien sits on the toilet but with the lid down.
Paradise Lost
laid open on her lap, her hands wiping at her cheeks and nose with starchy tissues. In the past three minutes she has aged twenty years. And yet, at the same time, she sits in the knee-to-knee, pigeon-toed posture of a child.

“I’m sorry about that in there,” I say. “I was enjoying myself.”

“Me, too.”

“Seems like our friend doesn’t want us to have any fun.”

“That, or you’ve got some
serious
sexual guilt issues.”

She coughs out a laugh. And keeps coughing. One hand gripped to
the countertop and the other against the wall, holding her body up as it heaves against some new obstruction in her chest. In only a couple of seconds, her skin colors. Not pink, but blue.

I fall to my knees and get close to her, unsure how to help. The Heimlich? Mouth-to-mouth? Neither seems right.

All at once, O’Brien stops coughing. Stops
breathing
. Eyes wild, pleading. Her hand brought to my face so hard it almost knocks me onto my back.

She pulls in the little air she can in a long draw, forcing herself to be calm. It takes a long time. A sudden quiet except for the book that drops, flopped open, to the floor. Both hands braced against my shoulders.

Exhales.

Something comes loose within her rib cage with an audible click. The sour-milk breath from the deepest pockets of her lungs blows out at once. And with it, right at the end, a fine spray of blood. Warm dots landing on the tops of her legs, my chest, my face.

And then she’s breathing again. Patting at my stains with the bath mat.

“God, I’m sorry. That was
awful
,” she says.

“You scared me there for a second.”

“
I
scared
you?
I was
drowning
.”

My brother. The river. My father standing in the current, transformed.
Drowning
. Even this single word seems intentional. But I’ve never told O’Brien about Lawrence other than that he died accidentally when I was young. If she’s drawing a connection to me, it’s coming from some other source.

“We should go to a hospital. Get you checked out.”

“No hospitals,” she says. “Don’t even
mention
hospitals again. Understand?”

I slide back from her as she stands before the mirror and washes her face. I’m about to rise, too, when I notice the copy of
Paradise Lost
sidled up to the edge of the tub. Open to page eighty-seven, where Satan decides upon his plan to ruin mankind by tempting Eve with knowledge.

Can it be sin to know,

Can it be death?

It’s also the same page where
Live while ye may, / Yet happy pair
appears. Along with a single point of O’Brien’s blood near the bottom of page eighty-six.

In the mist that blew forth from her chest, only one part of her landed on the book. A glistening asterisk next to “Jupiter.”

Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter

On Juno smiles.

“O’Brien?”

She turns and I hand the open book up to her. I watch as her brain goes through the same interpretations mine just did.

“You don’t use a red pen, do you?”

“No.”

“So that’s part of me there,” she says. “Doesn’t seem like an accident.”

“Nothing does anymore.”

“The Sunshine State.”

“There’s a Jupiter in Florida.”

“Yes, there is.”

After the briefest pause she’s past me. Slipping into my bed and pulling the sheet up to her chin.

“An hour’s sleep first,” she says.

“Not sure I can sleep.”

“Then get in here and keep me warm, for Chrissakes.”

I hold her against me, somehow colder and bonier than she felt only moments ago. Each breath a small fight. Around me, the darkness mulling over what shape it will take next.

I
WAS WRONG ABOUT BEING UNABLE TO SLEEP.

You have to be asleep to wake up and realize something’s changed
about the room. That the bed is empty now. That the sound that wakened me was the click of the door being pushed shut from inside.

“O’Brien?”

I can’t see anything. Which means only that my eyes have yet to regain their focus in the dark, and not that nothing’s there.

Because something is there.

The hush of a leather-soled shoe pressing down on carpet. A metallic glint floating higher. Closer.

“Don’t scream,” the Pursuer says.

The voice even, mistakable for kindly. A doctor warning of a brief discomfort as the needle goes in.

“It won’t make any difference,” he says, now setting a knee onto the mattress next to me.

His face coming into semi-visibility. Perfectly calm, distracted almost, his thoughts far away. The hunting knife hanging in the air, still as the light fixture over the table behind him.

“Please. Not yet,” I think I say, though the storm of blood in my ears makes it impossible to tell. “I’ve gotten so close.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

His back straightens. The foot still on the floor readies for the push forward as he brings the blade down.

Yet when the knife comes, he comes with it. A heavy collapse on top of me, so that I have to wriggle out from under him.

Once I’m standing I reach for the bedside lamp. But it’s the one on the other side that comes on first. A single 60-watt bulb revealing a collection of elements I can’t put together.

The hair at the Pursuer’s crown seeping blood, leaving a wet halo around his head on the bedsheets.

The hunting knife, polished and dry, lying on a pillow where it landed.

O’Brien standing behind him, the ceramic lid of a toilet’s water tank leaned against her toothpick legs. A half moon of blood at one end.

I meet her eyes but she doesn’t see me. She’s too occupied by lifting the heavy lid again, kicking the backs of the Pursuer’s legs wider
so she can step between them, and bringing it down on his skull once more.

Its weight brings her with it. For a long moment she lies on the Pursuer’s back as though she’d fallen asleep in the middle of giving him a massage. But then she’s sucking in air. Waving her hands until I realize I’m meant to take them.

O’Brien lifts away and the two of us tumble against the wall and slide to the floor. We watch the body, waiting for it to move. It doesn’t.

“Can you carry me to the car?” O’Brien asks directly into my ear.

“Sure. Yeah.”

The room is quiet. The yawning stillness that follows the abrupt discontinuation of noise. Yet the events of the past moments were conducted in near-silence. A violent shadow dance of whispers and shuffles and sighs.

“David?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m thinking
now
.”

W
E TAKE SHIFTS THROUGH THE NIGHT. ONE DOZING, THE OTHER
cruise controlling, then pulling over, switching seats. We don’t talk, not at first. Warm air blown off the Gulf spritzing the windows. The tires humming in search of some forgotten melody.

“That was him, wasn’t it?” O’Brien eventually asks.

“Yes.”

“He would’ve killed you.”

“And you, too, once he was done with me.”

“So can we have our own little trial here and now and call it self-defense?”

“We don’t need a trial.”

“Humor me.”

“Okay. Case dismissed.”

“Just promise me one thing.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t ask me what it felt like. Doing it.”

“Okay.”

But then, after an AM listener request for “Hotel California” is over, she puts her hand on my own.

“The terrible thing is how easy it is,” she says. “You give yourself a reason, and killing is goddamned easy.”

She laughs a squeezed laugh through “Bad Moon Rising.” Then cries for half of “Stairway to Heaven.”

We don’t speak of it again. Which means we’ve forgiven ourselves, recognized the necessity of our actions. That, or the demon we search for is already a greater part of us than we’d like to believe.

B
Y DAWN WE
’
RE DEEP INTO THE
P
ANHANDLE, BREAKFASTING AT
a Waffle House just outside Tallahassee. While I work through my icing-sugared French toast, O’Brien taps at my iPhone screen, searching for why Jupiter may be our intended destination.

“So we’re looking for what, exactly?” she asks, sipping her coffee and shaking her head at the bitterness as it goes down. “Cult rituals? Babies born with claws?”

“Nothing that obvious. Just a story that doesn’t add up.”