Demon

by Tosca Lee

  “Are you doing this to me?” I managed.

  “No.” But he watched me intently, in the same way scientists must observe lab rats after infusing their cages with cigarette smoke or injecting them with red dye.

  “I feel ill. Something’s wrong.” I hauled in a slow, heavy breath, considered my lack of sleep, took inventory of all I had eaten today: cereal, coffee . . . more coffee. Not enough. I was exhausted, and my blood sugar was low.

  “How tenuous and tedious it must be, keeping that balance of rest, food, and sleep.” He spoke dispassionately. “Come on. We’ll find something to eat.”

  We passed the bronze statue of George Washington atop his horse and came out through the Garden’s iron gate onto Arlington. Walking seemed to help, as though the motion had reagitated my coagulating blood. I was headed toward Newbury Street to a coffee shop that served gourmet sandwiches and bottles of imported sodas. I veered left, looking for the next crosswalk, thinking I could hear Lucian’s boots half a step behind me.

  I was halfway across the walk when I heard the stuttered screech of tires grabbing pavement and a thud off to my right. I started at the sound, braced, stupidly, toward oncoming traffic. Someone screamed.

  But it was not me.

  Half a block down the street a car was just settling to a stop. Two more abruptly halted behind the first, narrowly avoiding an accident. Pedestrians stood frozen on the sidewalk, hands covering their mouths. More, emerging from the Garden, stopped short.

  A man got out of his car, a cell phone in shaking hands. Shouts for an ambulance. Traffic backed up. Someone began to divert it to the far lane where cars filed by, heads swiveling behind the wheel.

  I ran on shaky legs toward the car with the crystalline web for a windshield but stopped with a white-hot chill when I saw the crumpled form on the asphalt. I had thought he was behind me.

  A bystander announced she had called 9-1-1. A man ran toward the curb, bellowing at someone snapping a picture with a camera phone. A mounted policeman rode out of the Garden, the horse cantering too prettily and far too slowly.

  More people joined the clot of onlookers on the Garden side. A young woman in a peacoat hurried to the small cluster on the pavement, obscuring my view, saying she was a nurse.

  Get up! I thought, angry, terrified. What was he doing? Making a scene? Playing dead? Could demons die? One of his sneakers rested on the asphalt, some fifteen feet away.

  He hadn’t been wearing sneakers.

  I pushed through to the knot of people kneeling in the street, unable to hear anything but the thudding in my chest.

  It wasn’t him. The leg splayed out in macabre yoga was distinctly female. Blood pooled in an inky blot beneath her head, black against the pavement. It mottled her hair, which had come loose from its ponytail to stick to one side of her face in sticky, crimson-blonde fingers. A shattered pink iPod was still strapped to her arm.

  Somewhere bells were ringing, church bells, perhaps from Park Street Church across the Common, maybe from Arlington on the corner. I stumbled back and searched the growing crowd for Lucian. But he was gone.

  7

  I was sick with the kind of horror one feels upon realizing he forgot to lock the gun safe—the one from which a neighborhood kid steals a handgun and shoots someone. Or upon waking from a drunk to the realization he’s had unprotected sex with a prostitute. It was the kind of fear in which one realizes he has courted danger under the guise of negligent normalcy.

  And now a woman lay dead.

  I backed toward the curb, the gruesome bouquet of tire rubber, blood, and urine in my nostrils, as the woman in the peacoat administered CPR. Eventually, she sat back on her heels, breathing heavily, arms dangling on her knees.

  A fire truck and then an ambulance arrived, sirens wailing. The way the medics left the body where it lay—the way the police shut down the street, took aside the traumatized driver of the car, interviewed some of the bystanders—it all seemed so haphazard. Like a chaotic game of pickup sticks, as primitive as surgery conducted with sharp stones. I had had such faith in this city, in the civic marvel of emergency response and modern medicine, and a woman had just died on the asphalt.

  I lingered even after the ambulance drove off, silent and empty. I fixated on the policemen, trying to gather the courage to say something. To tell them that I knew. That I knew who—what—had killed that woman.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of those too-old teenager’s eyes, narrowed at her after his staged fall, those young man’s lips murmuring seemingly to himself.

  I never got anything to eat. Instead, I found a liquor store and bought a bottle of merlot—a bottle with a screw cap. I carried it home in its paper bag inside my coat and gulped from it in long, less-than-covert pulls on the T like a common wino. I hissed and then shouted at random buildings on the walk home, calling Lucian out, calling him a murderer. People walking by gave me wide berth, and I let out one of Lucian’s hysterical laughs in response.

  I WOKE WITH THE cold claws of panic inside my chest. I had been prone to anxiety attacks in the past and could feel the old eddy now, offering to suck me into the spin cycle. Don’t think about that. Get up. Move.

  Queasy and unsteady on my feet, I pulled open my apartment door and stumbled down the stairs to the bank of mailboxes inside the foyer. I averted my eyes from the glare of midmorning sun pouring through the glass double doors; I didn’t want to know what or who I might see standing there, peering in with too-knowing eyes. I snatched one of my neighbors’ paper.

  Back in my apartment, the door locked firmly behind me, I folded the Globe open on my kitchen counter, paged past the national section to city and region. There it was, page B2, just a tiny mention: “Woman Dies, Hit by Car.”

  A woman was struck by a car and killed yesterday on Arlington Street at about 4:48 p.m. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The identities of both victim and driver were withheld last night pending investigation.

  I searched through the rest of the section, but there was nothing more.

  I felt infected—by dark words, images, and influences, by my own willingness to expose myself to his particular strain of evil. While his first appearance had been a startling aberration, his presence in my life had become more real, more normal to me than the facts of my everyday existence. Just yesterday I had stepped willingly from the corporeal world into an alien spiritual realm.

  What did it mean that a demon could infiltrate my life? And what were the implications for me that I had willingly met with him since? That death followed him even as he spoke of heaven, of God?

  Worst of all, I could not erase the memory of that sound. Of a human thrown into a windshield. It should have been hard, the crack of a body breaking. But it had been sordidly dull, as muffled as a gun fired through a silencer.

  Someone knocked at my door. I jumped, sweat breaking out on my back. Was that him? Would he come here? I wished I had my laptop open to my calendar. I never wanted to see that cursed L. again, but at least I’d know if I should answer the door or stay here, trembling and silent.

  I sat very still. There had been no buzz from the front door, but did that matter? Would he force his way in if I didn’t answer? Somewhere I had a list of this building’s tenants and their numbers. If I called, maybe a neighbor could investigate for me. But no, that was stupid; I wouldn’t know what to tell them to look for. He could be a twelve-year-old selling Girl Scout cookies for all I knew.

  “Hello?”

  I didn’t move.

  “Clay? It’s Mrs. Russo. Are you there?”

  I exhaled and moved on slack legs to the door. I had unlocked it and started to pull it open, relieved at the thought of seeing her short gray hair and smooth olive skin, the crow’s feet around her eyes, when I was leveled by a frightening idea: Could Lucian show up as someone familiar to me?

  Again the eddy, the cold fingers clutching at my chest.

  Panic is an illusion, a small voice inside me said. Open the door and face he
r—it—whoever it turns out to be.

  I pulled the door the rest of the way open, ready for anything.

  A plate of muffins. Blueberry, by the look of them. Across our shared second-floor landing, Mrs. Russo was just closing her door. Upon hearing me, she came back out.

  “Well, there you are!” She smiled and retrieved the plate from the mat. I stared, making certain it was the same Mrs. Russo who had brought me lasagna the day I moved in, who had helped me arrange my furniture—which consisted of little more than a few items on sale from Crate & Barrel and a desk my grandfather made for my eleventh birthday—and who had declared the result “elegantly Spartan.” Mrs. Russo, the widow whose husband had died of the kind of complication people sued hospitals over—though I don’t think she did that. It would have seemed beneath the woman who often referred to those things that can and can’t be changed, and to the will of God. Mrs. Russo, whose mail and newspapers I collected when she went to visit her children and grandchildren. Mrs. Russo, who was always baking, warm and homey smells drifting out onto our landing from her apartment as they did now from the plate I accepted from her hands. My stomach cramped.

  “Clay, dear, are you all right?”

  “I’ve been sick.” It wasn’t far from the truth. Dehydration had taken its toll. I was sure that my face was pasty, my eyes shadowed and hollow. My breath was certainly bad enough.

  Have you ever been harassed by a demon? I wanted to blurt.

  “Have you? That must explain why I’ve been thinking about you so much these past couple of days.” She reached up to lay the back of her hand against my cheek. Her crisp white shirt crinkled when she moved. A double strand of pearls hung in the neckline like a beady smile around her neck. She was made up for the day, her lipstick the color of new bricks. Her hand smelled like Jergen’s lotion.

  “Well, you don’t have a fever.”

  I wanted to tell her everything, from the first meeting in the café to the dreams and the accident—the horrible accident—to unload it all like tears spilled in a mother’s lap. But one long, stream-of-conscious sentence out of my mouth and that matronly look would change to alarm or worse. Mrs. Russo would disappear behind her door, and this moment of relative normality would be taken from me as surely as the peace had disappeared from my life that first night in the Bosnian Café.

  What peace? I had not been at peace before this. But even my discontent and general aimlessness had been better than this.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” She frowned, her hand going to her hip. Her camel pants were smartly pressed, and I realized she was about to head out for the day. I nodded, angry at finding myself on the verge of tears.

  “I think I need to lie down. Thank you, Mrs. Russo, for the muffins,” I said. She looked as if she might say more, but I gave her a weak smile, thanked her again, and closed the door, hoping I hadn’t offended her in my graceless haste.

  I SPENT ALL DAY thinking about who to go to. Who I could tell without seeming like a lunatic. And I came up with only one answer.

  No one.

  I LOCKED MYSELF IN my apartment for two days. I slept in fits on my sofa, refused to open my laptop for fear of what I would find on my calendar, and ate Mrs. Russo’s muffins. Though I had never suffered from agoraphobia, I began to understand how easily I could become one of those people who refused to leave their home. I wondered if any of them had been stalked by demons.

  On the second day I found myself rationalizing what happened in the Garden. Lucian really had tripped. When he murmured, he was merely talking to himself, calling himself clumsy and cursing his human body. Maybe he made an appreciative comment—she had been an attractive blonde, after all. That he disappeared when he did meant nothing; he routinely disappeared when I wasn’t ready or whenever I wasn’t paying close attention.

  Anything to explain it. The truth was too appalling.

  Sometime into the second day, after calling in sick again, I retrieved the stack of notes from my desk drawer. The summary account of my demonic encounters to date consisted of portions of two notebooks, of random pages stuck inside the cover of one, and the backs of a few pages from the recycle box. The last of these pages was scrawled in wild, volatile script. I had started to write about the Common and the Garden the night of the accident but never finished—mostly because I could not reconcile reality with Lucian’s strange behavior and the events that followed.

  The other reason was that I was drunk.

  Lying on the sofa and reading through my notes up to that day, I began to feel a strange sense of control—over my words, if nothing else, as though I had captured and contained events that defied rationality. The page brought order, a shape to all experience, the comfort of events scripted into story.

  I picked up my pen and began to write, chasing reason, meaning, sanity.

  8

  After three days in my tiny apartment—the false, mundane world shut out beyond my door—my denial made its pendulum swing to reckless acceptance. The mad ruminations, the nightmares, the panic gave way to exhaustion until, in my depleted state, it became very simple: I could never return to my in-transit, post-divorce life. My life might never be normal again, but I could not keep to these sequestered shadows forever. I was tired of playing the specter in my own life, of huddling behind the flimsy lock of my apartment door.

  Lucian had the power to kill me—he had proven that much. And if that’s what he wanted, there was nothing I could do about it.

  But I didn’t think that’s what he wanted.

  For whatever reason, he desperately wanted to tell me his story. He wanted it written and published. And though I had no intention of doing either, I had the power to give him both.

  Like a fever, my fear broke.

  The next morning, I lowered my chin into the collar of my coat. I did not look into anyone’s eyes on the street, nor did I make my routine stop at the bagel joint near the T station. Even so, I half expected some stranger to hail me by name, to signal me in the front lobby of my office. To turn toward me on the elevator as the doors closed.

  Nothing like that happened.

  When I passed Sheila’s desk, she asked how I was feeling. She had circles under her eyes but managed a small smile that still managed to look attractive. She had always been like that—almost prettier when suffering. It used to tug at my heart, and it brought back the old envy I had felt toward Dan when he first started seeing her. Even when her mother died, she had been beautiful, a weeping Madonna at the funeral. Today, however, that trait struck me like a line repeated one too many times. I murmured something about the stomach flu and feeling better. I didn’t want to talk to her.

  “Oh, Clay,” she called after me. “Your nine o’clock is waiting for you in your office. She came early.”

  I hesitated. I hadn’t opened my calendar in two days and therefore had no idea who was in there.

  No, I had one idea.

  I veered off into the bathroom. The trembling was back in my hands. I heard again the hopping skid of tires against pavement, the thud of the collision. The back of my neck felt clammy despite the chill of the morning lingering in my fingers and on my cheeks.

  So much for bravado. He had never let me escape him for long. The last time—the only time—I walked away from him, he had infiltrated my dreams. Breathing deeply, I walked myself through my conundrum to the conclusion that had freed me from my apartment prison: For whatever reason, I held the keys to something he wanted very much.

  I reshouldered my bag, which was stuffed full of the same untouched proposals I had taken home with me last Friday, and walked resolutely to my office. The door was ajar, and a vibrant female voice seemed to fill up all the space behind it. I knew that voice, and it was no demon. Well, not technically.

  “Clay!” Katrina turned from the window, clapping her phone shut. Her coat was thrown over the chair in front of my desk, the upside-down Burberry tag staring out like the vacant smile of a doll. “You look good. Have you lost weigh
t?”

  I unloaded my bag as she told me about her train ride in, her new apartment in the city, her latest stash of exciting new proposals, her growing stable of up-and-coming writers. I docked my laptop but didn’t turn it on.

  “I’ll take a look at whatever you have,” I said. Despite the fact that she tired me out, she never gave me shoddy stuff, and I needed some fast acquisitions.

  She hesitated, and I realized she was weighing the stacks of proposals, queries, and boxed manuscripts on my credenza and bookshelf. I was either more backed up than usual or had grown in popularity.

  “They haven’t hired a new editorial assistant, have they.” She sat down on the Burberry-covered chair with crossed arms, peering out at me over the fine arch of her nose—which was probably as designer as the rest of her. Her nostrils tended to look like slits—until she got excited about something, in which case they flared. “How are you doing Clay, really?”

  I sat down, sighed, and gestured at the paper skyline. “I’ve been sick. I’m behind. I could use about five solid projects right now to fill out our next season. I’ll never get through all of this in time. So anything you want to send when you get back—”

  “You know I will.” She paused and then, on seeming whim, reached for the bag covered with Coach’s trademark Cs. “You know I don’t bring a lot with me”—she pulled several packets from her bag—“but here are a couple that might trip your trigger.”

  “I’ll read them this afternoon.” I meant it. I needed to patch at least one more project together this week or next to take to committee. Still, I took them with the sense of one accepting a meal from a questionable Samaritan.

  She pulled another few pages from her magic bag. “And then I have this strange little orphan. Highly experimental. Frankly, I’m having some trouble finding a home for it.”