Creatures of Want and Ruin

by Molly Tanzer

  To Fin, however, probably she did seem to have her act together. It was a little like how to Ellie, Fin seemed to have an easy life.

  Fin’s situation might not be as dangerous as Ellie’s had proven to be on a day-to-day basis, but it was just as treacherous. Wealthy Fin certainly was, and out of touch, but Ellie could not deny that the conditions under which she’d been living sounded depressing and strange. Additionally, she had been through a troubling experience without any support, in part because Ellie had sold her alcohol of unknown, and apparently unknowable, provenance.

  Fin lit another cigarette, her last. Acting completely on impulse, Ellie reached for it. She inhaled deeply. She wasn’t much of a smoker, but Rocky sometimes had them, and she enjoyed the occasional puff. Fin grinned at her, and Ellie laughed. Amityville might be changing, and her life with it, but the camaraderie that came from sharing a cigarette would probably always be the same.

  “Well . . .” Ellie began awkwardly.

  “A very deep subject,” said Fin, and giggled.

  “Jesus Christ,” groaned Ellie. “Look . . . all right. Let me just say, and no insult to you, but the important thing about everything you just said is this vision you had.”

  “I agree. My home life is insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. What I care about is the island.”

  Ellie warmed to Fin a bit more, hearing that. She sounded sincere. “Well, it all might be insignificant in some grand scheme, as you said, but it also sounds terrible. You don’t deserve what’s happening to you. At the very least they should have listened to you about the, you know, vision,” she said, a bit of bitterness creeping into her tone as she thought about Gabriel’s dismissive attitude. “And I also think your husband should tell you to scram if that’s what he really wants. What’s the point of pretending he wants to stay married when he doesn’t?”

  Fin’s lips twisted, but no tears fell from those wide blue eyes. “I’m guilty of the same. I could have left him any time,” she said softly. “I have a lawyer. I could have had her figure it all out. She got me out of serving jail time; she could get me out of my—”

  “Jail time?” Ellie stared at Fin. She, a member of the criminal element of Amityville, had never been arrested . . . yet Fin had, with her angel-blonde hair and her angel-blue eyes and her little white suit that probably cost more than Lester’s lodging for his first semester. The world really was an amazing place.

  “Oh sure,” said Fin. She was being completely serious. “A bunch of us got ourselves arrested for mailing out pamphlets on family planning.”

  Ellie boggled at her. “So, not just charity balls, then?”

  “Not just. Being arrested scared me, though, and I left that all behind me. What does that say about me?”

  Ellie shrugged. “I’ve never tried to be anything other than what I am now, so what do I know?”

  “You know a lot.”

  “Here I am, sleeping in another man’s bed instead of living with my husband-to-be, trying to figure out . . .” Ellie trailed off, not sure how to describe what she was trying to determine. She’d been doing a lot of thinking about the masked men and the island, and still had no idea what to do about any of it.

  “So you and Mr. Rockmeteller are . . .”

  “Mr. Rockmeteller!” Ellie snorted. “Anyway, Rocky and I, we’re just . . . friendly. “

  Fin gave Ellie an arch look. “Very friendly, I’d say.”

  “Gabriel knows. He . . . doesn’t mind.”

  “He seems like a nice man.” Fin sighed. “Having things out in the open like that . . . what a relief. I made it with a ukulele player right before I had that awful vision—at the party, I mean. Jimmy doesn’t know.”

  “Was he cute?” Ellie grinned at Fin.

  “Very cute.”

  The two women dissolved into more giggles, their shoulders crashing together like waves as they leaned toward each other in conspiratorial glee. Ellie wondered if she’d given up something precious without ever fully appreciating what she was losing when she’d become busy and let her childhood friendships flicker out.

  She hadn’t had much choice in it, not really. Her father’s enlistment had meant they’d all needed to do more around the house to make up for his absence, as had his unexpected return. Rocky, and then Gabriel, had consumed her few free hours after she met them. Friendships were difficult and messy, at least in Ellie’s experience, whereas Rocky had been a casual source of stress relief.

  And Gabriel . . . Well, the heart had a way of making time for itself.

  She knew she ought to be talking to Fin about bigger matters, like those men in the woods, or Fin’s vision of the end of the world, but it was just so pleasant laughing with her in the cooling afternoon, their toes in the sand. It had been so long since she’d done anything this frivolous.

  The creak of a door and the sound of footsteps behind them brought the two women back to reality. A shirtless, sleepy-eyed man with floppy hair emerged from the house, suspenders holding up his threadbare slacks.

  “Oh, company,” he said, pleased but confused. “Sorry I didn’t hear you down here before. I was working.”

  “Todd Rockmeteller?” Fin was a bit unsteady as she lurched to her feet. “I’m Fin Coulthead, Delphine Coulthead—at least for now I am, a Coulthead, I mean—and I’m ever so pleased to meet you. I’m a fan of your work.”

  “Is that so? Why, thank you.”

  Ellie watched the two of them as they made awkward small talk about The Ginger-Eaters and the various poems in City Songs and Sea Songs. Talk about friendships being messy and complicated . . . Fin hadn’t been here even an hour, and it was obvious that she’d immediately hit it off with Rocky. The air practically sizzled between those two as they chatted.

  Ellie didn’t mind. Moving in with Rocky had been a stopgap. She’d never planned to make it a more permanent arrangement, and after a few days with him, that desire hadn’t changed. Rocky rarely woke before noon, long after Ellie could even relax in bed with a book, and stayed up so late she hadn’t gotten a good night’s rest since arriving. And as for his other habits, well, the stack of dishes in the sink and the layer of dust had become a lot less charming now that she was living there, as opposed to swanning in and out.

  When Rocky invited Fin to “come on up” to see what he was working on she demurred, to Ellie’s surprise. The woman was practically panting.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m already going to inconvenience Ellie by asking her to take me back across the bay tonight. I shouldn’t waste her time. We have a lot to discuss.”

  “What are you two girls talking about, then, if I’m allowed to know?”

  Ellie hesitated. She hadn’t spoken to Rocky at all about her concerns about the masked men and the strange things she’d been seeing and feeling around Hunter. It had been easier to just omit that whole part. Fin, however, had no such scruples.

  “Honestly, I know it’s going to sound crazy, but not long ago I drank some bathtub liquor and I had this terrible vision of, well, if not of the end of the world, then at least the end of Long Island. And Ellie seemed to think there was something to what I was saying.”

  “Ellie, is this true?”

  “It is,” she said. “I saw a miracle in broad daylight, and masks that changed as I watched them. I saw a man’s skin get so hot rainwater steamed off him, and . . . and other queer things.” She finally met Rocky’s eyes. He looked astonished. “I was afraid to tell you. Gabriel didn’t believe me.” Ellie felt uncomfortable, like she was betraying her fiancé, so she said no more.

  “You ought to have told me, love!” Ellie saw Fin’s eyebrows shoot up at the word; likely she didn’t realize it was just a term of endearment, not a statement about his feelings for her.

  “You mean . . . you believe us?” said Ellie.

  “I only write about what’s real. I told you that,” said Rocky. “I said it was something you and I had in common, don’t you remember?”

  Ellie
did; she’d just interpreted that differently, given the more fantastical elements of The Ginger-Eaters. As it turned out he’d really meant it.

  “Wait,” said Fin. “Are you saying demons are real?”

  “Let’s go inside,” said Rocky, glancing at the darkening evening. The insects were getting louder, their chitinous chorus both familiar and unsettling. “It’s better to talk about these things behind closed doors.”

  Once inside, Rocky confessed a part of his past Ellie had never known about, and surely would never have believed before recently: the commune of artists and aesthetes who shared their minds and bodies with a demon from The Ginger-Eaters was based on a real one, and he had grown up there among them, but not one of them.

  After hearing that, Ellie needed a drink.

  “I wrote The Ginger-Eaters after I moved to New York,” Rocky said to them both as Ellie uncorked a dusty bottle of real Glenmorangie that Rocky had smuggled into the country when he’d emigrated. “That’s when I felt finally free enough of the demon’s influence to write about it.”

  Even though Rocky’s cool recital of the circumstances of his upbringing made Ellie feel as though her experiences of the past few weeks were not the delusions of an injured mind, it was a lot to accept all at once. Based on what she had witnessed thus far, it was certainly possible that Hunter did possess powers granted to him by some diabolic entity . . . but it all still seemed a little too much like a story in one of Gabriel’s magazines.

  “The demon my family served was a powerful, seductive being,” he said, “innocent in many ways, but still obscene. I never desired to commune with it. I’d seen what it could do—how it changed people without them realizing it. Which isn’t to say my family wasn’t a happy one. We were, but I never fit in there. I couldn’t abide it, wondering all the time if I was actually talking to my mother, or to a demon. That’s why I wrote The Ginger-Eaters. I’m glad it resonates with the more common sort of experiences people have of losing themselves in a lover, or to a career . . . but I have hoped, secretly, that someone might read it and decide against trafficking with demons.”

  “But you make it sound so appealing,” said Fin. “I mean, the girl . . . She loses a lot, but she gains so much.”

  “I had to write the story honestly, or not at all. There are always advantages to communing with a demon—but there are too many disadvantages.” Rocky’s smile was sad. “What are demonic powers to having control over yourself?”

  “What indeed,” said Fin softly. Ellie wondered what she was thinking about, but when Fin caught her eye, she blushed and changed the subject. “So . . . there really was demonic ginger candy?”

  “Ginger everything. It was a taste I knew from infancy, though of course they never fed me any of the demonically infused stuff. They never dosed anyone who didn’t volunteer . . . though I’ve often wondered if I received anything while I suckled at my mother’s breast. I know she communed with it while I grew inside her; demons do not easily let go of their hosts. In order to be healthy enough to bear a healthy child, she would have needed to keep doing so. And my father, too . . . He was a diabolist. Who knows what lurked within his donation to my existence.” Ellie had never heard Rocky sound so bitter.

  “So you think this liquor of Hunter’s is like the ginger?” asked Fin.

  “Demons can’t physically manifest in our world. To commune with one, a human must consume something into which a demon has been summoned. It’s usually a plant—most animals don’t survive direct contact with demons any better than we do. But there’s always a cost for the human.”

  “Not for the demon?” asked Fin.

  “If there is one, I wouldn’t know,” said Rocky primly.

  “I wonder what the cost to Hunter was.” She shook her head. “I’m amazed that he would drink spirits to do anything, much less commune with a demon. For one, he’s a teetotaler.”

  “People like him always make exceptions for themselves, in my experience,” said Fin, lighting another of Rocky’s cigarettes.

  “I guess my question is, if he is communing with a demon through liquor, is he summoning it into the booze itself, or distilling it from something corrupt?” asked Rocky.

  “It tasted earthy, oily,” said Fin thoughtfully, and her eyes went wide. “Fungal—and there was that big disgusting protuberance that seemed sort of mushroom-like in my vision.”

  “Those mushrooms!” said Ellie. “Of course . . . They’re everywhere, and they weren’t around before this summer. I’d have noticed them.”

  “Mushrooms?” Rocky asked.

  “Nasty ones,” said Ellie. “Slick, oily things that have been cropping up everywhere. They’re full of some sort of liquid that burns skin and smells like kerosene.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d want to eat,” said Rocky. “I suppose distilling them might make them more palatable?”

  “It sounds possible, as much as any of this does,” said Ellie. “But . . .”

  “But?” asked Fin.

  “It’s just odd that I drank it . . . but I didn’t have this vision.”

  “You drank some of it?” asked Fin.

  “I did. That’s why I sold it to you. The night I . . . acquired it, I tried a sip. I didn’t have any problem with it; it just tasted like young spirit, maybe a little more harsh than most. I did notice that earthy taste, though, now that you mention it.”

  “But you believe me?” Fin asked.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because you didn’t have the same experience, that’s why.”

  “You didn’t see Hunter change moonshine into water, right? But you believe me?” Fin nodded. “Well, there it is. Our experiences are similarly inexplicable.”

  “‘Inexplicable’ is the exact word for it,” said Rocky. “Demons are fundamentally unfathomable. The one my family summoned had no real goal I knew of beyond expanding the consciousness of its companions—not through any altruism, you understand; just because it pleased it to do so. Just the same, they encountered demons with less warm intentions toward mankind . . . There are many, and the one this Hunter character is consorting with seems to be one of those.”

  “I’ll say.” Fin shuddered. “In my vision I felt how strongly it desired to destroy Long Island. I just don’t know why he—Hunter, I mean—would want that. He lives here.”

  Rocky stood. “Now I need a drink,” he said, and took Ellie’s cup. “Another round?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “When Hunter spoke at his little rally, mostly he talked about rebirth, and change . . . not destruction. Cleansing this place.” She took a sip, and considered. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve heard him talk about the destruction of ‘our’ way of life. But he seems to want to take back Long Island for the people he thinks deserve to live here, not destroy it so no one can. Why would he work with a being that wants to make this island uninhabitable? Your vision didn’t really sound like the sort of place anyone would want to settle down and raise a family.” Ellie shook her head in disbelief, and then something occurred to her. “Could someone be deceived by a demon?”

  “Of course,” said Fin and Rocky, at the same time. Ellie looked at Fin inquiringly.

  “That’s what happens in The Demon in the Deep, after a fashion . . .”

  “The children’s book?” said Ellie curiously.

  “Yes . . . her last—Georgiana Baker’s, I mean.”

  “I only ever read Three Nights at the Cottage.”

  “I’ve never even heard of her,” said Rocky.

  “She’s an American writer who wrote children’s books for girls,” said Fin. “Her last book was called The Demon in the Deep, and it was all about a woman, Miss Depth, who strikes a deal like we’ve been talking about. She wants to see the truth of the world, understand its inner workings, its reasons for dealing generously with some and cruelly with others.” Fin always remembered that line. “The demon says it can show it to her . . . but the cost is that one day
, she’ll have to give up her body to the demon. And, well, that happens. She’d thought the demon meant eventually, but it meant immediately.”

  “And then what happens?” asked Rocky.

  “The book’s heroine, a girl named Susan, she tries to save Miss Depth, but she doesn’t succeed. Miss Depth disappears.”

  “What happens to the girl?” asked Ellie.

  “Susan never finds out what happens to her friend. And in the end she starts to wonder if she should summon the demon, too.” Fin shrugged. “It’s not Baker’s most popular novel.”

  “I’d imagine not,” said Rocky.

  “That certainly sounds less child-friendly than the one I read,” said Ellie.

  “Anyway, in the book it sort of tells you how to summon a demon,” said Fin. “At least, it alludes to it. The woman conjures it into her sister’s homemade beach plum jelly.”

  “Beach plum jelly?” Ellie laughed. “Is she from around here? Baker, I mean?”

  “Cape Cod, I think . . . ? Why? Do you have beach plums here?”

  “Sure! They get ripe in September. My mother makes beach plum jelly every year. She has her own secret patch of bushes; every woman on Long Island does, I think.” Ellie got up and rummaged through Rocky’s cabinets for a bit, and then withdrew a jar of something claret-colored. She raised an eyebrow at Rocky. “Still here! Ma would be so insulted.” She set the jar on the counter. “Well, Fin, if you want to try some it’s right here, and I think it’s some of the best.”

  “I assume it’s not demon-tainted beach plum jelly,” said Fin. “Or demon-tainted Scotch, for that matter. I wish we had some of what I’d drunk! We’re talking over something I saw once, and we can’t even duplicate my results to see if we can do anything about it. If we’re trying to prevent what I saw from happening, it would be better if we could all be on the same page.”

  “But we can, if we want to,” said Ellie. She felt silly for not having thought of it before. “We have the liquor here.”