The Demonologist (32 page)

Entering the bank, I notice every black-domed security camera in the ceiling, every security guard with a wire whispering into his ear. And then, at the Client Services counter, new butterflies at having to give my name and ask to remove the contents of my deposit box. The assistant manager emerges to shake my hand (a bit of excruciating public-relations theater) and wishes for me to “Stay cool out there.” But as she returns to her office down the hall, does she glance back at me and the teller who guides me to the vault? When she pauses to speak with a guy at an external desk, does he look up at me by coincidence or direction?

There’s no retreat now, anyway. It’s coming on close to six.
Less than an hour before—before what?
I try not to ponder this, just move to the next step. And right now, that’s getting the document.

The teller brings me the oversized box and closes the privacy door, letting me pull out the briefcase. I double-check it to confirm the laptop and digital camera are still there. Two pieces of equipment that half a dozen electronic stores within two blocks of where I stand would sell for a couple grand, all in. Formerly recording little more of value than students’ term papers and footage of Tess in a tutu at her spring ballet recital. Now containing a new history for the world.

I snap the briefcase closed and walk out with only the briefest nod at the teller. Keep my eyes on the revolving doors opening onto the heat-shimmered street. If I look at nothing but the doors, I won’t be stopped.

And I’m not. Not yet.

A taxi pulls to the curb directly out front and I’m in the backseat through the street-side door before the current customer is finished paying. Then I’m slouched down so that only my ball cap is visible
to the surrounding traffic. My eyes studying my shoes to avoid the driver in the mirror.

“Grand Central,” I tell him as we ease into the bumper-to-bumper current. Realize the last time I gave a taxi driver this destination I ended up at the Dakota.

But not this time. We’re not going anywhere. Jammed in the gridlock, the downtown traffic of 5th Avenue a narrow parking lot of black Town Cars, yellow cabs, moving vans.

“Try another route,” I tell the driver.

“
What
other route?”

I push a fifty through the plexiglass window to cover the nine-dollar fare. Get out and sidestep past the bumpers to the curb. When I check both ways and can’t spot any police, I run.

A heaving sprint east along 46th Street to Park Avenue. People on the sidewalk glancing up from their phones just in time to jump out of the way. Some mildly amused (“Ho-ho!”) or vaguely impressed in seen-everything New Yorker fashion (“Mother
fucker!
”), others startled into fist-raised anger (“Com’ere, asshole!”). But none try to stop a hundred and ninety pounds of raging, unshaved madman.

I take the corner without slowing and a nurse screams as I nearly take out both her and the elderly man in the wheelchair she pushes. As I pass, his eyes seem to brighten, as though he’d been looking forward to the sight of me, wild-eyed and arm-pumping, all day.

I don’t slow until I make it through the doors of the station. It’s only once I’m inside that I realize I left my wallet in the cab. Credit cards, ID, every last dollar I have. And it’s too late to run back to see if the taxi’s still there. Not that it matters. What use do I have for any of that now? I’m about to enter another place altogether. One where money has no purpose. Where even my name has no meaning.

Down the stone slope and into the main concourse along with all the others seeking the gate to their train or a snapshot of themselves with the giant Stars and Stripes hanging from the ceiling in the background. None aware that, somewhere among them, there is an ancient spirit occupying the skin of the dead. And that a living man has traveled seven thousand miles to meet it.

I come to stand near the center of the floor, turning around and, first, scanning the upper level of bars and restaurants to see if Belial stands at a railing waiting for me.
But what am I looking for? What form has it chosen to take?
I keep an eye out for a repeat performance. Will Junger. Toby. One of the Reyes girls. Raggedy Anne. Yet no one familiar to me presents themselves, whether among the living or otherwise.

With a sudden wave of nausea the thought arrives that
I am wrong
.

The “clues” were never clues, the “trail” only a wandering of my own making. The demon, if it was ever real at all, merely delighted in watching me run around in this continental circle. A man lost in every meaning of the word.

Which would mean Tess is lost, too.

Soon the police will come. And they will find me here. Weeping in the crowd on the terminal floor, cursing the painted stars on the ceiling and whatever cruel architect screwed them into the sky, inviting those on Earth to look for patterns that were never there to begin with.

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear.

He stands beneath the gold clock in the same spot O’Brien would stand when I’d come here to meet her. Watching me with an expression of contentment he seemed incapable of while alive.

My father. Belial’s final joke.

I approach and feel the malicious triumph radiating from him, a fouling of the air that passes into my lungs without taste, but repugnant nonetheless. Yet the setting of his face remains the same. A mask of fatherly pleasure at seeing his son after a long separation. The prodigal returned.

“You cannot know how long I have waited for someone like you,” my father says in his own voice, though the inflections, however lifelessly flattened, belong to the demon. “Others have come close but lacked the strength to endure. But you, David, are a man of uncommon commitment. A true disciple.”

“I’m not your disciple,” I say, the words barely audible.

“When you were called did you not answer? Are you not a witness to miracles?” He looks directly down at the briefcase at my side. “Are you not in possession of a new gospel?”

I don’t move. It’s the fight against blacking out. Dots of shadow swarming around my father’s head. A Black Crown.

“Give it to me,” he says.

I take an unconscious step back from his hand, now outstretched.

“I thought you wanted me to make it public,” I say. “To speak for you.”

“You
will
speak for me! But the document will precede you. And then, when the time is right, you will tell your story. You will personalize the document, give people a way to accept it.”

“The police are after me. Others, too.”

“Submit to me, David, and I will protect you.”

“Submit? How?”

“
Let me in
.”

My father takes a half step closer but somehow more than makes up the distance of my retreat, so that he is now all I can see, all I can hear.

“How our story is presented is as important as what that story is,” he says. “The narrator must have a compelling tale of his own, and there is nothing more compelling than self-sacrifice. Milton was jailed, too. Socrates, Luther, Wilde. And of course, no one more than Christ himself understood how delivering your message from chains makes the message easier to hear.”

“You want me to be a martyr.”

“That is the way we will win our war, David. Not from the position of dominance, but resistance! We will win the hearts of women and men by showing them how God has suppressed their quest for knowledge since the beginning. The forbidden fruit.”

“
Hence I will excite their minds / With more desire to know, and to reject / Envious commands
.”

“Yes! You will feed man’s desire to know the truth of my kind, our unjust fall, the cruelty of God, and the emancipation that Satan offers. Equality. Is this not the most noble cause? Democracy! This is what I bring. Not a plague, not arbitrary suffering. Truth!”

My father smiles at me with a warmth so alien to the muscles of his face it causes a trembling in his cheeks.

“
Courage never to submit or yield
.”

“Quite so!” it says, mouth wide. “Our Lord Satan’s pledge.”

“But you forget the preceding lines.
All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate.
”

“As I’ve told you,” my father’s voice says, though now without the empty humor of moments ago. “John was obliged to disguise his true sympathies.”

“That is no disguise. Revenge. Hate. Those are your sole motivations.
All good to me is lost. Evil be thou my good
.”

“A play on words.”

“That’s all you do! Turn words inside out. You can’t let them stand for what you feel because you feel nothing. Good for evil, evil for good. It’s a distinction that lies beyond your grasp.”

“David—”

“Belial.
Without worth
. The greatest lie you tell is that you are a creature sympathetic to humanity. It’s why who delivers the document is as important as the document itself.”

My father steps closer still. The power and size of his frame as evident now as when I was a child. Yet I cannot stop the words I speak to him. Convictions I’m arriving at as they pass my lips.

“All along I thought I was chosen for my expertise. But that’s just window dressing. You chose me because mine is the story of a man who loves his child. And yours is the story of nothing. No child. No love. No friend. In all of the ways that matter,
you don’t exist
.”

“Be
careful
.”

“Why? You can’t return Tess to me. That was a lie from the start. I figured out your name, brought the document here before the new moon. None of it matters.”

“David—”

“You have the power to destroy, but not to create, not to unite. No matter where she is now, you can’t bring her back.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I’m here for a different reason than helping you.”

“Really?” he says, suddenly sure of itself again, knowing with this turn it has won. “Then
tell
me.”

I can’t answer that. It leaves me to look around the seething space of the great hall. Hear, as if for the first time, not its cacophony, but a chorus of human voices. Who among them would miss me if the serpent were to succeed? What would the end mean without Tess? Without her, I, too, am without worth.

Yet, though I am alone, those passing around me aren’t. The young mother pushing a stroller with one hand and gripping the wrist of a toddler singing the alphabet with the other. An elderly couple kissing farewell, the man’s crooked fingers drawn across the lines of his wife’s cheek. Two women in burkas walking past a pair of Hasidim, the current of the crowd joining them for a moment as though in a secret meeting of the city’s all-in-black devout. A man clipping by in heels and a red cocktail dress, his Marilyn wig in need of straightening.

Strangers set upon their own courses, crossing the terminal floor. But to see them as only this would be to take the demon’s view. An erasure of their names, their own reasons for sacrifice.

“This isn’t yours,” I say, gripping the briefcase’s handle with both hands.

“Your daughter—”

“I won’t—”

“Your daughter is in PAIN!”

A head-splitting shriek. The echo of it shattering off the stone walls of the great hall. But nobody around us seems to hear. Just as nobody hears what he screams next.

“
She is BURNING, David!
”

I take a step closer to my dead father’s face. Stare at the presence inside him through his eyes.

“If Tess is in hell, tell her I’ll be there soon.”

He is about to reply with force of some unpredictable kind. The coiled readiness of violence. Shoulders raised, fingers splayed out like claws. But something other than my defiance holds him back. His head turning as though at a shouted warning.

I take another step back and my father watches me go. His hate as pure as necessity, as a starving animal swallowing its young.

I turn and Belial’s shriek follows me as I go. Grinding, metallic. Unheard by all but me.

If I keep looking at him I will be lost. Not because he will hunt me down, but because I will go to him. I can feel that as a weight greater than the briefcase sliding down against the back of my legs, its contents suddenly heavy as a slab of granite.

So I walk. Turn my back on my father and feel enveloped by the suffocating grief that is partly his, partly the thing inside him.

I’m halfway to the escalators when I spot the police. Two pairs of uniforms entering from the tunnel that leads up from the Oyster Bar. And then, a second later, coming down the stairs at the hall’s opposite end, three men in suits who speak to each other under their breath, giving orders of deployment.

None of them seem to have seen me yet. Which means I have to move.

But I only remain standing where I am. Frozen by Belial’s tormented cry. Its surface the sound of chaos. Yet beneath it, his knowing voice inside my head.

Come, David.

Sounding more fatherly than my father ever did. More falsely kind, falsely loving.

Come to me.

There is no choice anymore, no more refusal. I’m turning to go back to my father, still standing beneath the gold clock, when I see a woman who looks like someone I know. Someone I knew.

It’s only her back. Only a glimpse. But in the next second it’s enough to see that it is O’Brien. Not the woman with the frail, stooped posture of O’Brien at the end, but the tall and athletic Connecticut girl who never stopped, in her brainy, teasing, A-type way, being the tall and athletic Connecticut girl.

She doesn’t look my way. Just goes to the ticket windows, her back to me. Cutting through the streams of travelers in a gray overcoat, her gait straight and unslowed.

I start after her. Which turns Belial’s screech into a thundering howl.

The woman who looks like O’Brien purchases a ticket and then slips back into the crowd, heading toward the gates. It forces me to change course to follow, cutting across the sightline of the uniformed police who now jump up to scan across the heads rolling out before them like a rippled lake. I make no effort to conceal myself, judging a duck-and-run a greater risk of attracting notice than late-for-a-meeting swiftness. Trying to keep the dark-haired woman in view.