“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 alclass="underline" 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.