The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  “Shut up. Stop for one fucking second. You want proof? You know proof is one of your jailer’s favorite diversions, right? You’re fucking smart enough to know all that, though, right? So fucking smart. Okay, be still, open your mouth, and don’t fight it. I’ll give you your fucking proof.”

  Sunny began to say something but stopped herself. She glanced over to the thing hovering in the mason jar and then looked back to Agares. She opened her mouth. He leaned closer; his voice was warm, oiled leather. “C’mon out… come on,” he whispered, “don’t be shy, give it up to me, give it…” Sunny felt a sensation not unlike the panic just before you vomit. It welled up in her as she felt something moving up from her stomach, to her throat, in her mouth. Her body tensed, and she felt like she was drowning. Agares locked gazes with her. His eyes went dark, either in anger or something sexual. “Relax, don’t fight me on this… easy… easy. There we go.”

  She watched as a tiny sun drifted out of her mouth and hung in the space between her and the old man. It raged, it flared, it slowly rotated, and tiny prominences jetted from the surface only to spill back down. Clusters of dark motes marred the radiant surface. She closed her mouth and stared at this thing that had just come out of her.

  “This,” Agares said, “is the human soul. Your soul. Your small part of the collective essence of mankind.”

  “What… oh shit…” Sunny started to rebuff this, to claim he had somehow dosed her again, perhaps a flashback or… but she stopped herself. The blazing orb was like looking into a mirror; she knew what it was, instinctually. The old man was telling the truth; this was the essence of her, the totality of her. “How,” she said, softly, almost prayer-fully, “how can I still be alive and talking without my… soul?”

  “It’s close to you,” he said. “You wander too far from it, and your skinsuit shuts down and your soul goes back into the cycle, until you get spun into another body, get born, live again.”

  “So, that—” she pointed to the spinning octahedron “—that is Meth’s soul?”

  “No,” Agares said. “It’s… well, the closest analogy would be to say it’s an artificial soul, constructed by the divine dictator that runs this world. We were his attempt to make his own life, based off of you, but he can’t make a true soul, like what you all have. He created us as servants, guards, to help distract you humans from the confines of this universe. I guess you’d say you were kind of like divine robots. But that,” he nodded toward the small sun, “that is the real deal.”

  “If you’re supposed to distract me from what’s really real,” Sunny said, “why tell me all this stuff?”

  “Well first of all, because you wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it, and secondly because there was a revolt against the tyrant. We wanted to free all you poor bastards, let you see the universe as it really is, give you the choice to go insane or tough it out and make your own way in it. We lost.”

  “What happened to you, to the other rebels?”

  “We were told that if we didn’t do our jobs, we’d be stripped of corporeal existence,” he said, nodding toward the octahedron. “Our essence would be locked away, and we would remain in perpetual limbo. Some refused to play along, and they are gone now, nothing but memory. We were given tasks, karmic busy work. Like, for example, Meth’s job is to keep humanity in a stupor through drugs and addiction. Any human who wanders into his domain becomes his responsibility. Mine is to misdirect by granting wisdom, to blind by helping wayward families come back together. ‘Home’ and ‘family’—attachment in any form, really—are big snares to keep your kind distracted. ‘The ties that bind,’ and all that.

  “We’re pitted against each other by management. We’re given perks when we keep y’all distracted, unfocused, and clueless. If we under-perform our essence could end up as a paperweight on some angelic douchebag’s desk. The angels, the servants who didn’t rebel, have dominion over us. It’s a pretty shitty existence, to be honest, but we still rebel in our own little ways, like me telling you all this, opening your eyes to the reality past the lie. Most of us are still on your side. We want you to be free. We just have to be careful with how we do that.”

  Sunny was silent. She stared deeply into the brilliant, contained inferno of her soul, as Agares saw it reflected in her brown eyes. Finally she said, “I figured that if souls were real, I had fucked mine up a long time ago.” She looked past the tiny star to the old man. “You said we can’t do that, can we?”

  “Nope. You can dirty them up, life to life, but they are pretty much self-cleaning. By the time your body dies and you come back in your next body, it’s shiny again. Your soul remembers everything, though, even things your conscious mind don’t. It’s the source of your dreams and your nightmares. Best we’ve ever been able to figure out, you’re learning, striving to become more than you are, to become God. This world was designed like a narcotic, to drag you under, keep you here, until you don’t care about higher truth, until you’re dead. Then you do that again, and again, and again.”

  “Anyone ever gotten out?”

  “A few,” he said. “Saints, Buddhas, prophets, messiahs. So, now that you know all this. You ready to call it quits? Move past your anger and pain?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I tried that. His roots and his poison are too deep in me. I have to make this final. I have to put him down before I can try to rebuild.”

  Agares sighed. “Even knowing what I just told you, even knowing you’ll send him back into the wheel, not to Hell? The only Heaven and Hell are here, the ones your kind make and my kind tend?”

  “I understand,” she said. “I still need this. I have nothing left.”

  Agares carefully called Sunny’s soul back into her body. It was as amazing a feeling as its departure had been a terror, as if for one resplendent instant, everything inside and out made sense. The old man took the mason jar and carefully opened it. He clutched Meth-istopheles’s essence and whispered to it in a language Sunny didn’t recognize, which sounded like cold water rushing over slippery river rocks. The words made the insides of her ears itch. She got up and left the room, packed a small bag, and took the remainder of the box of bullets for the .38, after she reloaded the gun. She splashed water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror. She hardly recognized the person who stared back. She returned to the living room to see Agares pulling on his bloody campaign coat and his hat. Meth-istopheles’s essence was gone, but the room smelled like strong chemicals.

  “He’s in Tampa,” the old man said. “Let’s boogie.”

  ***

  The adult care facility off of De Leon Street in Tampa was a dingy, cinderblock tomb painted the color of mustard. The old man parked his truck in the parking lot, turned, and looked over at Sunny. “This place is pretty much off the books,” he said. “They collect Medicare money for warehousing him here. Meth-istopheles said he was here because of a drug overdose that put him into a persistent vegetative state. He’s been here for years.”

  “You coming with me?” she asked.

  “I’ll be along presently,” he said. “I want to give you a few minutes. If you are still going through with it, you may want to use something other than the gun.”

  She got out and found her way inside. The hallways were dark and cool. They echoed with The Price is Right on dozens of TVs in different rooms, and smelled of shit and Pine-Sol. No one was at the reception counter, but she found a directory of residents and their room numbers on a sign near the door. She located Papi’s name and made her way down the hall to his room. Her hand was damp on the butt of the pistol in her purse.

  The door was open, and the shit smell was worse inside this room. She crossed the threshold and was face-to-face with Papi—or what was left of him. He weighed about 80 pounds now and had a few yellow teeth jutting from diseased gums in his drooling, gaping mouth. His face was skeletal—hollow craters for cheeks—but she could just make out the roughest edges of the monster who haunted her. It was him. But the creatur
e she had wanted to blow a hole in, to watch breathe his last, ragged breath was long, long gone.

  She pulled a folding metal chair next to the bed and looked around. No TV, no radio, no cards, no gifts, no little bears. Four bare walls and a bed holding the shell of a life. She didn’t feel pity well up in her; instead, the anger remained bright and strong.

  “This is exactly what you deserve, you son of a bitch,” she said softly. “For Mom, for Aunt Lira, for Mendo.” She felt the gravity of grief pull at her, and she thought for a moment she might cry, but she wouldn’t give the prick the satisfaction. “For all of us you ruined. For me, you bastard, for me!” Her voice was shrill, and it set off a series of shouts and shrieks all along the hall.

  “The pillow would be best,” Agares said, suddenly at her side. “He’ll be gone in few minutes.”

  “There a problem here?” asked a burly attendant standing at the door wearing a white T-shirt stained with some unrecognizable green-and-brown substance. Agares turned and shook his head.

  “Just emotional,” he said, pointing to Sunny who was still sitting, still looking at her father. The attendant rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  “Just keep it fucking quiet,” he growled and disappeared down the hall.

  Agares turned back to Sunny. “Well, you ready to keep your promise to me?”

  She remained staring at Papi’s body, watching the chest rise and fall. A fly hummed around the stale, hot air of the room and landed on Papi’s nose. He didn’t move.

  “Nothing beyond this, right?” she asked, looking up at Agares. “No torture, no gallery of regret to wander through, no justice?”

  “Nope,” he said. “A cosmic crucible of fire and light, churning, burning clean, then sending him down a stream of starlight back into the universe, back into the queue to begin again. There is no payback, no even-steven in this universe. No justice, no mercy, no reward, no punishment. All that only exists here, now.”

  Sunny stood, placed her hands on the cold rail of the hospital bed and looked down at the broken, starving memorial to this monstrous man and his inhuman acts. “I’m staying here,” she said. “I’m not going to kill him, free him. I’m going to sit here day after day and watch him die, trapped in a rotting husk. This will be his Hell and I will be his Devil.”

  “What about getting past this, getting on with your life?” Agares asked. “He could be here for years, decades. What about your life?”

  “I want him to suffer,” she said. “I want the immortal part of him to weep, because I didn’t let it fly free. He took my life away from me. I might as well be trapped in that stinking body with him. This is all I have left. Maybe after he’s escaped, died, maybe there will be something after that, but I doubt it.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “I am.”

  The old man sighed and nodded. “Well, I guess in a weird way you’re keeping your word to me to kill him, just doing it at your own pace. Go on and get your shit from the truck. I’ll be along in a second.” Sunny looked at the old man and then at her father. She walked out the room.

  Agares leaned closer to the comatose man’s face and smiled. “You hear me in there, don’t you? Yeah, you do. I can see you still burning, still shining down in all the muck and matter. Well, I know it took a while, but I made good on our agreement, didn’t I? You said you’d lost her, and she was yours, and you wanted her back, wanted her home, where she belonged, and here she is. By your side until the day you die.”

  Agares tipped his hat to the living dead man and ambled toward the door, still grinning. “I do so love bringing families back together.” The old man walked down the shadowed hall of Hell hearing the echoing screams of damned souls trapped in slowly dying bodies, brains rotting, abandoned in this world, waiting for death like a lost lover to free the bright bits. The sounds of suffering were an anthem, and the old man whistled along with it as he went to help Hell’s latest willing occupant settle in to her new home.

  ABYZOU

  Abyzou is a female demon. Her name is sometimes said to derive from the Greek abussos, “abyss.” In the pseudepigraphical Testament of Solomon (dating from the first through third centuries AD), as Obizuth, she describes herself thus:

  I am called among men Obizuth; and by night I sleep not, but go my rounds over all the world, and visit women in childbirth. And divining the hour I take my stand; and if I am lucky, I strangle the child. But if not, I retire to another place. For I cannot for a single night retire unsuccessful… For I have no work other than the destruction of children, and the making their ears to be deaf, and the working of evil to their eyes, and the binding their mouths with a bond, and the ruin of their minds, and paining of their bodies.

  She further confesses that the angel who can confound her is Raphael (also the subduer of Asmodeus in the apocryphal Book of Tobit). Solomon, the narrator of this text, describes her thus: “She had a head without any limbs, and her hair was dishevelled. I beheld all her body to be in darkness. But her glance was altogether bright and greeny, and her hair was tossed wildly like a dragon’s; and the whole of her limbs were invisible.” Solomon orders “her hair to be bound, and that she should be hung up in front of the Temple of God,” a detail that suggests her appearance might have been inspired by Medusa, a Gorgon (monster) whose severed head was also displayed on Greek temples (and sometimes Jewish synagogues) to ward off evil.

  The high rate of infant mortality in ancient times caused Abyzou to be much feared. Indeed a number of amulets from Byzantine times mention her by name and often portray her as kneeling, bound, and being whipped by a figure identified as Solomon or Raphael.

  In 2012, Abyzou made her debut in popular culture as a dybbuk (possessing spirit) in the horror film The Possession. Online references to this film sometimes state, incorrectly, that her name is Hebrew for “taker of children.”

  CLASS OF ‘72

  J.D. HORN

  The color of moonlight, the boy’s paleness was a stark contrast to the violet rings beneath his eyes and the russet scabs on his knees poking out from the dove-gray shorts. Same shorts worn by all the boys Emma had seen at the Karkhous Academy, though the fields that surrounded the school’s central manor, classrooms, and dorms were blanketed by snow. A snow whose surface remained pristine, the academy’s students never straying from the cleared concrete paths.

  The girls, Emma had taken special notice, wore knee-length skirts cut from the same gray, lusterless cloth. Like the boys, they wore dingy white button-down shirts topped with thin cardigans the color of the manor’s slate gray roof shingles.

  The chill inside was such that she could see the mist of her breath as Miss Carreau, a woman with vermillion-colored hair and an onion-like odor, led them—Emma, her parents, and her younger sister Isabella—across the great hall.

  The pale boy hummed to himself in a high, tuneless pitch, unaware of their presence. He sat on a straight-backed bench, which reminded Emma of the pews at the church her grandfather had attended—the one they had visited with him whenever her parents fought about money. Those fights always led straight to her grandfather. He would sign a check, then hold it an inch or so beyond Father’s reach as he scolded Mother, claiming they’d just about tapped the well dry. That it was time they both put aside childish dreams and find lucrative employment. Yet they’d come back again and again. “The only way to make it in Hollywood,” Mother was fond of saying, “is to look like you already have.”

  There’d be no trips to Grandfather’s now. Emma’s mother’s brother, the one she and Isabella were never to call Uncle Ray again, had inherited Grandfather’s almond orchards and—outside of smaller bequests she and Isabella would receive at age twenty-one—the balance of his bank accounts. The lawyers provided Mother with an accounting of the years of grants and unrepaid loans to explain why Grandfather had thought this was fair.

  “Both girls will be addressed as ‘Miss Wiley,’ and both must learn to speak only after having been spoken to,” Miss
Carreau continued, ticking off a list of rules she’d begun enumerating the moment after greeting them.

  Emma jolted as Miss Carreau paused beside the boy. She’d come close to believing he was a product of her own imagination. If she focused hard enough on him, it seemed she might see through his translucent skin. His bench sat beside a mahogany door fitted with a frosted window. On the glass, stenciled in black block letters, were the words “Ana Bardalea, Headmistress,” followed by “Class of ’72.”

  Emma meant to ask if the headmistress had once been a student at Karkhous, but her father spoke first. “Is that really necessary? To address the students so formally? I mean, they’re just kids.”

  “The world lives and dies by formalities,” Miss Carreau said, her chin pulled low, a crease splitting her forehead. “Besides, Headmistress Bardalea feels a formal manner of address is good for discipline. It discourages favoritism.” Her eyes narrowed on Emma. “Discourages those who might seek it out.”

  Miss Carreau shifted her penetrating gaze to the boy. She looked down over her nose and made a tutting sound as she regarded him. “Have the older boys been roughing you up again, Mr. Beck?”

  The boy startled at his name, as if he had only then noticed the woman standing before him. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Bit his lip. Shook his head. “No, Miss Carreau.”

  Emma could tell he was lying. Most likely to avoid worse treatment at the boys’ hands later.

  “The Wiley family has chosen to arrive early,” she said, a hint of accusation in her tone, “for their meeting with Headmistress Bardalea. We’ll put the call through to your mother as soon as the Wileys have been accommodated.” She emphasized the final word as she cast an icy glance at Emma’s parents.

  “No,” Father began, “we don’t want to interrupt your schedule, it’s only, well, we thought it might be easier for the girls…”