The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  Shudders override her. She is no longer an accomplished woman, not the things she’s experienced, nor the truths she’s learned, nor the moments shared with people met all over the world. She’s been reduced to a quivering animal, paralyzed in fear of death, lost and adrift. Such fear is a poison that expands to fill her vision. She can’t tell whether her eyes are open or closed.

  “I’ll believe again,” Dalia promises, grasping, though she doesn’t know what this means. A flash of memory throws her backward, tumbling across decades of her life, to a room in a church, lit yellow from high windows.

  Young Dalia, kneeling before a crucified figure.

  Is this her?

  “Yes!” she cries. Her terror shifts, becomes more solid and comprehensible. She recognizes this glimpse of memory. “I promise, I’ll take back everything I said. I’ll repent. I’ll offer myself again.”

  Something shifts, a movement which seizes Dalia’s awareness. A sound of someone brushing past the inner curtain and entering her private room. The stink of her sweat and illness subsides, as if a window has allowed a gust of fresh air. No windows are open, but the shift in atmosphere is so abrupt, she feels certain someone has arrived. Is it possible, in the moment of her final breakdown and desperate prayer, her willingness to pledge her very soul, that someone might help?

  She struggles to sit up, to see, expecting one of her clients. But it’s a man, maybe half Dalia’s forty-nine years. He crosses the room, as if having casually browsed past shelves of bottled tinctures and oils, and bundles of exotic herbs, to stumble into this private back room, somehow failing to realize this isn’t a part of Dalia’s Apothecarium meant for public access.

  Of course, she doesn’t care, now. She feels only relief that someone has come. Her eyes are slow to focus. He makes a narrow figure, elegant in a tailored suit of a neutral, nameless color. His skin is pale, his chin-length hair streaked white and black.

  Unable to rise, Dalia lifts a hand, certain the man’s lingering, bemused smile must indicate that he hasn’t yet seen her. But he does see. His gaze does not avoid the awful mess of her bed, the rank tangle of blood and sickness. But as if uncomprehending of Dalia’s plight, he seems only pleased to have found her. Her breathing comes fast, in a shallow, animal whine.

  “Help me,” she cries, straining.

  With a rush of shock, she recognizes the man. She doesn’t know exactly where she’s seen him before, but he’s someone she knew before she arrived in this town, during her long travels, or even before. Handsome, even delicately pretty, with the idealized, glistening smoothness of a retouched fashion photograph. His skin appears lit with a soft-focus cinematic glow. He seems not to have heard her pleading. If anything, his smile becomes more relaxed, familiar.

  “Please, help me.” Dalia struggles to gain control. “A… a doctor.”

  The man approaches blithely. He appears intent on seduction or charm, or preoccupied with ramifications of this reunion which are beyond Dalia’s recall or understanding. He shows none of the urgency appropriate to the discovery of a dying woman.

  That’s what she is, Dahlia admits. Dying. Her situation is acute, her time slipping away.

  “Please,” she begs. “I need you now.”

  He reaches toward Dalia, and his hand finds the crest of her hip. The touch is not an open-palmed gesture of comforting, but a squeezing grasp. The pressure suggests an urgency Dalia fails at first to register, until the desire behind it hits her on a primal level. She’s surprised at her own body, at her hungry, animal-like reaction, leaving her suddenly overcome with a new kind of need. How is it possible to contemplate intimacy, sunk so deeply into fear and pain? A subconscious reconnection occurs, and she remembers. Memory floods in a rush of images, of terror and ecstasy, revealing a timeline of shared history deep and expansive. More than familiar, she and the man have been intimate. How is this something she could forget? She marvels at the new recognition, and the many, varied emotions and echoes of a part of her life long suppressed.

  Vision clarifies, and though the pain continues, she feels like herself again. Still she can’t remember his name.

  “What comfort I have, I will give to you,” he says, in a rhythm like incantation. He sits on the edge of the bed, close beside her. “I knew you would forget only for a while. Soon, you will remember the love in its entirety.” His sweet words overflow with reassurance.

  Dalia strives to remain hurt by his casualness, to insist he recognize the extremity of her plight. He should want to help. Yet even now, part of her wants to avoid seeming too needy, though she truly is desperate.

  She reaches for his hand, but it slips away. “Anything,” she begs.

  His appearance is agreeable in every aspect, to an uncanny, almost disconcerting degree. Features too perfectly aligned, every proportion exactly correct, as if sculpted from Dalia’s ideal conception of masculinity. Did he look like this when she knew him before? How is it possible she can see him this way, can be thinking such absurd, superficial thoughts concerning appearance and mannerism, even as her body lies so wrecked? Somehow, the pain has relented slightly, simultaneous with his arrival. Dalia has a sense that he’s caused her suffering to diminish, at least to a degree sufficient to allow her to see him clearly, to focus her admiration, and find a place of at least enough equilibrium to allow her to be enchanted.

  But why? His swagger, and that arrogant smile, seem so wrong in this place.

  He lies. That phrase comes to mind, though she’s unsure why.

  “You want,” he says, each syllable light and singsong, “something from me.” He shifts, as if about to lie down, but instead moves weightlessly across her to the lower part of the bed, and disappears from vision.

  She perceives a series of disconcerting movements under the sheets and blankets, an easy slipping beneath the fabric of her dress. Now, a touch of forceful, determined hands provoke her skin, fire hot, slick with sweat.

  His voice rises, yet Dalia can’t understand the words. Then she remembers, and realizes he’s waiting for her answer. This is what he does. He pauses on the brink, at the very point at which it’s impossible for her to refuse and turn back. There he waits for her to beg.

  Her gut heaves, a terrified jump from a place of uncertainty into definite need. “Please,” she moans, and this time the word carries a different meaning. “Yes, please.” She seeks release from pain and fear. The trauma of her wounds becomes less focused, more distant, fading into detachment. She senses the worst of the infection being met with a localized, burning cold, then removed by pressure, hard and sharp. A new heat takes the place of the burning, no longer specific to the wounds themselves, but spreading throughout her body. Not feverish with sickness, but shimmering with a modulated, internal fire. Tinges of pleasure emerge, broaden and become more complex, blending with other sensations that must certainly be remnants of pain, but in no way resembling the agony that troubled her just minutes earlier.

  She is aware of her rational mind observing with a distant intrigue this change within her, even as the greater part of her psyche is swept away on waves of sensation that seem, at first, utterly foreign, then familiar in some depths of memory. Her agony is almost erased, relieved so quickly, as if the entirety of her trouble has been cut free, a poisonous rot discarded, and the place of emptiness left behind, refilled with an ecstasy unequaled.

  Seems impossible she could ever have forgotten this.

  All pain supplanted by a yearning to merge, to wrap herself around the man enmeshed with her, flowing liquid beneath her stained skirts, drinking away her inner poison. Unseen, he absorbs every aspect of her injury, her trauma, her sickness. Dalia feels him drinking the pain and all its causes, apparently not harmful to him, but worthy of savoring.

  Suffering swirls into pleasure, a mix so complete Dalia can’t be sure which she prefers. Too much feeling, too sharp and intense, leaves her overwhelmed. Her legs tremble, her breathing quickens.

  Not only awareness of sin, but d
esire for it. She doesn’t care, she only wants—

  The explosion of pleasure and relief extends in time, broadens in scope, expands outward beyond love, belonging and acceptance. Fully embraced, she trembles in relief and recognition. She’s not alone. Every limb feels bruised, as if she’s been manipulated wildly enough to break every joint, yet she remains intact and alive.

  She breathes slowly again, surveying the sensations that flood back as consciousness returns. Dalia opens her eyes. The agony in her belly has subsided, replaced by a ticklish sensitivity. The bed is soaked with old, thick blood, and something else, newer, black and thick as tar.

  The man rises out of the sticky mess, covered in the substance like wet, black enamel paint. He lifts from the bed, stands away, momentarily out of view. When he reappears, his hands and face, his hair, even the fabric of his suit are clean again. The substance, whether manifestation of Dalia’s disease, or some emission of his, seemed too adhesive and staining ever to be removed. Yet he is able to wipe it away with his hands.

  Her own fingers are still stained, and adhere to the tacky bedding as she tries to pull them free, to hold them up for him to see.

  “What’s happened to me?” she asks.

  “Someone harmed you,” he says. “Unless you harmed yourself.”

  “No.” She holds out the black palms of her hands. “I mean this.”

  He approaches the bed, not near enough to touch.

  Dalia wants to reach out, ask him to clean her, to be taken up in his—

  “What else do you want?” he asks. His seriousness suggests she ought to consider her answer.

  Her mind spins with the implications of all that has changed. From the quiet routine of her days before Tuesday, to the sudden attack, without warning. Then, in the days since, to plunge so completely, to realize how near death remains at every moment. Finally, the drastic, inexplicable reversal following his arrival. If mortal danger is truly past, if she can think of desiring something other than simply to not die, then what does she want? Her chest and throat still ache from the desperate hyperventilating of minutes earlier. She tries to remain calm, reminds herself to be relieved at the arrival of help. The memory of suffering lingers, still near and vivid. “I want to remain alive,” she decides.

  He answers without pause. “Nobody remains alive.”

  “At least for now.” Dalia looks around, seeing her room for the first time, as if she has traveled somewhere distant, been absent long enough to almost forget this life, her shop, this town. “For the moment, at least.”

  He raises his left arm and looks at his wrist as if to consult a wristwatch, but there is nothing there. “You will remain alive for the moment, at least.”

  Now that she’s been flooded with recollection of so many detailed experiences with her visitor, it’s somehow worse, being unable to place him. She wants to trace backward, to run down the long, convoluted thread of her life, until she finds her way to where and when they met.

  He stands watching, seeming to read her thoughts. “I find you at these turning points,” he says.

  Dalia believes this, that she knew him in a time of some earlier crisis, but can’t imagine what that might be. “I’m far from where I began,” she offers, still uncertain, and hoping for further hints. She tries to wipe the blood from her hands, if blood is what it is. All the fabric, her skin, everything tainted.

  “You were poisoned,” he says. “You remain poisoned, even after I took so much.”

  “You helped me before,” she says, unsure what she’s about to assert, but trying to encourage her memory to be forthcoming. She extends her left hand, the hand nearest him, hoping he will at least wipe that part of her clean.

  “I helped you before, and I helped you after.” He smiles a different smile, one of concealment.

  Dalia shivers, wondering what he means by these riddles. She hopes he’s only teasing, waiting until she remembers the rest. Of

  course, she should just ask his name. There’s nothing wrong with admitting there are gaps remaining in her recollection. She’s afraid to grasp too hard at understanding, aware of her usual need for absolute control. For so long, through all the blurred decades of her adult life, she traveled widely, questing in a constant motion of endless study and speculation. So much of that time has blended into vague generality, thirty years compressed by lack of differentiating specifics. The names of places and people, now an echoing murmur, far behind.

  Lately, she has come to desire a life with boundaries she can see, with interactions she can touch and define. She accepts the impossible only so far as necessary to earn a living, to survive. All the passionate commitment of earlier life, those urgent desires that drove her, footsore and weary, until she settled into this place, all that drive has dissipated.

  Dalia looks at the man, tries not to look away. Somehow, the very thing that makes his features so pleasing, all mathematical ratios, proportions of line, surface and angle, like a complex geometric sculpture, these are the very aspects that make her need to look away after only a glimpse. It’s all too much, a dessert too richly sweet. Part of her feels ecstatic at seeing him again, at achieving this reunion so long anticipated that she forgot she was ever waiting for it. She can almost remember his name, the appellation that attaches to this pale, elegant face, the sharp-edged eyes, the distinctive fall of hair, and the slender height of his very distinctive frame.

  What is this wanting? Her memories remain impossibly confused.

  “I remember,” Dalia begins. What does she remember? “The first time I saw you…” She trails off, noticing his ankle boots, red suede with fine gold stitching around the toe and up the instep. These must be significant, some clue to his identity. He can’t be wearing the same boots from… how long ago? No, she has allowed herself to become distracted only because she still can’t manage to close the circle of recollection. Memory, another blind alley. Why does she feel every time she’s about to put it together, he manages through some dodge or misdirection to make her forget, yet again?

  She feels weak, foolish, susceptible. At least she’s no longer dying, at least not immediately. More than ever, she doubts herself. She keeps pretending, trying to draw out further hints, while he remains so obviously comfortable with her confusion. Surely he’ll explain himself eventually, if she only encourages him to talk. Maybe he’ll reminisce, or mention some detail she may recognize. Of course, if she remembered anything of her own past, she might be able to draw him out.

  “And what has become of you?” he asks. “Once a world-walking seeker. Now, what?” He surveys the room, seeming to focus beyond the curtain, toward her shop’s public outer room. “Reader of cards. Maker of potions. Divining truths by tossing rune sticks, or gazing into crystals?”

  Dalia’s cheeks flush. Her impulse is to protest, but she knows he’s right. She’s thought the very same things herself, using these exact words. It’s as if he’s capable of reading all the self-doubt that bubbles within her. Is he able to study her inner life, like reading words on a page, or did these notions arise within her at his suggestion, prior to his arrival? Instead of answering, Dalia props herself upright. At least her wounds no longer trouble her so much.

  “You occupy yourself with conjurations, yet speak no love of your own?” he continues, his tone almost bitter. “You scry answers to the amorous, yet speak no words of your own yearning? Build potions to enhance physical desire, yet drink no pleasure for yourself?”

  Dalia’s nature has always been to rise when challenged, to assert strength whenever words are spoken against her, even when she perceives them to contain some truth. Now she finds herself incapable of self-defense.

  “How sad,” he says, not an accusation, but a question.

  Nothing remains but to ask. She can’t hold her own in this interaction without knowing his name, and how they met. Already he makes obvious his disappointment in her, only moments after saving her with his…

  How exactly did he save her?

/>   His efforts were not medicine, of course. That should be some clue. His methods are not scientific, but more like her own.

  “The day we met,” he offers, “you were the most innocent. Among all of them, you stood out in your purity.” He watches, seeming to await recognition, and finally sits on the black velvet upholstered bench against the wall, beside the shuttered window to the alley, and the table before it.

  Dalia nods, still not understanding, hoping he might continue.

  “A virginal seeker, misled as to aims, but in spirit, immaculate.”

  Virginal, yes. A story reappears, like a book read once long ago and forgotten, and only now reopened. That was her, a segment of her own lost history, obscured in the same fog as this man’s name.

  So long since she considered her convent year. Days kneeling on hard floors, weeping tears pointless yet absolutely sincere, and staring in bereft supplication into the light streaming through windows so high, always and forever beyond reach. Now, all in a rush, it feels not so long ago. That period in life may seem in retrospect like only a few days, blurred in a distortion of drugs or wine.

  But the truth, she now recalls without effort. She spent a year in that place, until he came for her.

  “I was an aspirant,” she whispers. That word feels new. A young girl who dreamed of becoming a nun, who overflowed with passions she never completely understood. Did she become disillusioned on her own, or did this mysterious and unasked visitor’s first intrusion shape her wants? She recalls being wracked with doubt, even then.

  It seems impossible to be sure, looking back, whether or not he imposed this upon her.

  What she sees with renewed clarity is that she left that life, walked out and never looked back, to become a seeker in the wider, truer sense. Her reaction to that encounter shaped everything she was to become.

  Dalia finds herself now capable of looking at him directly, without blinking. She sees his perfection as an unreal blankness, like a newly painted wall. The smooth skin lacking pores or blemishes, the glossy luminosity of his hair, the rigid mannequin’s posture. She remembers that first glimpse, when he appeared behind her in the vacant stairwell. It was the one place beyond earshot of the rest of the order, her one daily moment of privacy. The way he glided toward her, and they slipped together so easily. No fear, not even in the first. A shy virgin, all renunciation and proud chastity, lingering alone on the stairs with a man she’d never before seen and didn’t know.