The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  She should have been afraid. Why wasn’t she afraid?

  The entire, detailed recollection floods back, carrying with it another round of the same prurient supercharge by which he healed her body. That first seduction, and all her plans discarded. Every aspect of her life thrown into upheaval by a single moment, only for him to disappear. What choice remained, having broken her vow? It felt impossible to beg forgiveness, to apologize to authorities, especially a figure in which she no longer believed.

  She decided to venture out, seeking the only perfection life ever granted her.

  Now, Dalia sees in the way he’s watching her that he understands, that he has followed and comprehended every aspect of the lapse and recollection of her memory.

  “Why did you forsake me?”

  He sits straight, so upright he seems to stretch and become thinner. His chin lifts, a gesture of refutation. “Always I remain.”

  Dalia rolls over in the bed, sits up and places her feet on the floor. She feels recovered, and more than that, energized. She stands, with slow caution at first, then fully upright, arms extended to both sides. This way, in her blackened dress, heavy with the stains of her blood and his emissions, she confronts him.

  “I didn’t want you to stay with me only symbolically.” She lets out a sigh, realizes this sounds pathetic, but doesn’t care. “I wanted to remain with you, not just serve from a distance. My endless, solitary wandering, it brought me so low. You left me with nothing.”

  She steps closer, confronts him where he sits on the velvet bench, his erect back near the wall, not quite touching. She fears he might flinch away, but he doesn’t actually move. She doesn’t touch him, as she knows he expects her to do. Instead she grasps at her own chest, tears open the front of her dress to reveal her flesh, then pulls the garment open lower, to show the bloodless wounds. Her fingernails press, trying to tear at the cuts, but they won’t reopen. “Not just these knife wounds. I was dying long before.”

  His face displays no sympathy or regret, yet even his neutral equanimity becomes a seductive offering. “I can offer a cure. This cure, final.”

  She hesitates, wants to argue, but belief is so tempting.

  “A cure forever,” he says.

  Excess of emotion, and her own wild swerve from ignorance to remembrance, leave Dalia overwhelmed and queasy. In reaction against her resentment at his abandonment, a new wave of physical desire rises within her. Forgetting all she wanted to argue or demand, now Dalia wishes only to suggest that he come to her again. Why not? Every disagreement or resentment might be washed away. With bliss comes clarity, at least for a short while.

  She imagines he may be causing her to feel this way. It’s easy to believe he prefers to distract her from her complaints. Always before, he’s managed to break off her protestations before they coalesced into real arguments. His greatest power seems to be not seduction, but suggestion. He evokes her compliance with the merest smile or subtlest gesture, by means of impulses which seem to enter Dalia’s mind from out of nowhere.

  Still she wants to protest, to speak a litany of old complaints and unmet needs. The words won’t come.

  “Dalia,” he begins, reasonable and entirely unobjectionable, “in your time, you have traveled the world’s glorious, hidden places. You have walked stairways high above the ground, and delved in tunnels far below it. You’ve swum waters cold and deep, and kept watch over vast, ancient spaces.”

  She remembers, but only barely. Most of these sights now seem shifted to an additional degree of removal, never encountered firsthand.

  “You have grasped unto wild flesh,” he continues, “and drunk from the cups of first and last mystery. You have inhaled the perfume of fragrant colors and ventured into dense atmospheres of tombs long undisturbed. Through all of this, ever since we met, you were Dalia of Belial.”

  “I’m…” she begins, and trails off.

  “I gave you the gift of everything you became.” He makes this assertion without pride, as if praising Dalia, granting her autonomy and acknowledging her centrality in her own history.

  She wants to resist, to raise the question of so many omissions from his summary of her story. Not to fight him, but to reassert the existence of other aspects of the world she knows to exist, of daylight time and mundane obligation, and all the effects these forces exert upon herself and every living person. Also, to insist on the inevitability of time and mortality, and the limit of his power to counteract these effects. He can’t deny, he must realize—

  But she notices him watching, presiding over this apparently closed subject. She remains quiet, tries to stay focused in her resistance, but finds this impossible as she looks at him. He’s attractive, magnetic, possessed of powerful, maddening charm, but the strength of his effect goes beyond superficial attributes. When Dalia looks at him, and particularly when he speaks, all intentions to resist, any contrary thoughts she may harbor, vanish in an instant. She wishes she might in some way assert autonomy, perhaps to remind him that she managed to direct her own path in decades of travel, as she sought to find him. Even this seems absurd and vain. Most of all, she just wants to remain near him, on any terms.

  If she can’t control him, can’t be his equal, at least she might let him see she’s her own person. If the past repeats itself, soon he will leave, no matter what she wishes. She’ll be alone again.

  This moment is everything she has. All is now.

  He moves closer, as if about to impose himself, but stops short of initiating contact. Once he’s within reach, Dalia is unable to stop herself. She reaches out, grasps his hand. On unexpected impulse, her free hand flashes toward his face, an attempt at a hard slap, which he easily avoids. All at once, he is the one holding Dalia motionless, restraining her by both wrists. She’s unsure whether she’s actually struggling to free herself, or if that’s only a distant impulse on which her body fails to act. He pulls her in, forces her to accept his kiss. The moment before their mouths meet, he changes slightly.

  She gasps, tries to inhale, and the liquid floods her mouth, rushes down her throat and fills her lungs. No resistance. The notion of exchange of power is part of the game. True resistance never occurs. The seduction is mutual.

  Pleasure surges within her, threatens to overfill her, not a slow accumulation like most of the sexual experiences of her life, but a sudden and wild rush. This is sometimes his way, this forceful taking, this redirection of her attention and energies. Dalia laughs without a sound, not breathing, not needing to breathe. Her body, her mind, all her questions and fears, all are overwhelmed with pleasure, full of his rightness and his truth.

  They stand clenched, facing one another, in what must appear outwardly a slow dance, close and rigid. Dalia lightly grasps the fabric of his lapel. The two of them barely sway.

  The feeling of suffocation rises. Unable to breath, she spasms, tries to cough. She can’t pull back. Both his hands grasp her throat, choking. Her eyes water, and she’s surprised, having thought that his hands were in her own, not on her neck. Lightheaded, she panics, but doesn’t resist. She allows herself to be overcome.

  He releases his grip, satisfied.

  She inhales, overwhelmed by nausea and dizziness, and notices that the effect of these experiences seems to be anchoring him to this place, fixing him in this concrete physical moment, contrary to her own experience of being swept away to abstract realms, seeming to become less a person and more a whirl of impressions and desires.

  She backs up, turns away so he won’t see, and vomits thin, black ink onto the floor. The liquid spatters and forms a puddle. In this smooth surface she sees her face reflected.

  “Now I remember,” Dalia gasps, and vomits again, again, until she’s empty. “I remember everything.”

  “My name?” He leans in from behind, initiating touch for the first time since he entered and sat on her bed.

  Belial.

  She doesn’t need to say it. To know is everything.

  “And your name?
” he continues.

  “Dalia of Belial.” She remains determined to make him hear her argument, that most of what she has been throughout her life derived from within herself and was not bestowed or forced upon her. But this argument sticks in her throat, refusing to be spoken. Even the wish to express such ideas begins to lose force.

  What Dalia wants most, what never wavers, is to hold onto what she has regained. She fears memory might slip, that he may depart and leave her again with nothing but a complex of empty, nameless yearnings. Desire overwhelms her, an urgent certainty that he should remain, that she must always be granted access to him, every day.

  “I remember those first months,” she whispers, “trying to reclaim the backward kiss. To seize again, even once, that explosion of impossible, perfect bliss. But you weren’t there. You were never there. For a long time I believed you’d return to me, in fact never doubted it until…” She stops.

  For a suspended instant, their positions are reversed. Belial seeming to wonder and to desire, while Dalia withholds.

  “Until what?” he asks.

  “The failure of a ceremony.” Dalia looks down at the bare skin of her chest and wonders at her own desire. She prefers to deny it could be imposed upon her, would rather believe it comes from within. The outrageous lust she felt upon their first encounter, so vastly outsized beyond the scale of anything she ever sought from scripture, so much larger and more potent than anything ever imagined. Not merely more intense and carnal than her pleasureless seclusion in the convent, but greater, more dynamic, full of blood and sensation, beyond the material worlds or realms of spirit.

  “I’m intrigued.” His face relaxes, no longer a mask, until after a moment he reasserts control. “I wonder how you experienced our meeting, and after, under my influence.”

  “I hid, and wandered in the trees.” She considers withholding this aspect of her story, making him ask, or at least wait. “I chanted your name. Weeks of meditation and fasting.”

  His face slackens in obvious disappointment.

  “That was only at first,” Dalia clarifies. “When sitting still and visualizing did nothing, I decided to move, to act. I traveled, sought gurus, asked questions, always learning. Then I secluded myself in the California desert, working ceremonies, hoping to conceive a child of your spirit. Your child.” The memory of her disappointment returns to her with perfect clarity, threatens to choke her with tears.

  Sighing, he steeples his fingers. “It would be rude of me not to ask. How did that turn out?”

  She wants to lash out at this affront, to chide him for mocking the frustrated desire that consumed decades of her life, yet to speak against him in such a way feels impossible. Every instance of such failure to stand up for herself seems singular in its moment, just a solitary impulse toward protestation fallen impotent rather than acted upon, yet the whole stretch of time from their first encounter has been characterized by exactly such defeats. This must be how he wants it.

  He moves into her line of sight, his head leaning slightly to one side, hinting at concession. “Here is what I would give you,” he says.

  “Follow the path of ease and pleasure. These lives are limited in number, and the risk of striving for abstract desires is great. Reach no farther than your own grasp.”

  She considers. “That’s what you give me? Philosophy?”

  He straightens, appears to expand and broaden, becoming regal and statuesque. “And don’t you deem my philosophies sound?”

  Dalia hesitates. She wants to offer a contrary response without taking ownership of it. “I knew a teacher who called you ‘The Adversary.’ He mocked my devotion. He told me I’d be better off forgetting you.”

  Belial laughs.

  “He swore your influence on mankind was nothing but obfuscation and interference. Those were his exact words.”

  For the duration of Belial’s laughter, his face changes entirely, his skin paled to ice white, deeply creased with striking black lines. When the laughing stops, the lines disappear, and no trace remains of whatever entity briefly revealed itself.

  “Yet you believe in me,” he says. “Even when you forget why.”

  She almost makes another small protest, but before she can speak her courage shrinks and she’s afraid again. She puts on a smile, hoping to convince him.

  “Will you tell me what keeps you alive?” she asks.

  “Alive?”

  “Intact, still moving and thinking.” She sits on the edge of her bed. “After… How long?”

  Slowly Belial nods, as if having decided some alternate definition of the word alive will have to suffice. “I avoid other people’s wars, holy or unholy. Three lives, three existences, that’s the most any should hope for, whether human or higher being.”

  “Are you a higher being?”

  He looks surprised. “Are you?” Belial gestures to dismiss his own question. “What would you prefer to think me? Angel, demon or god?”

  It’s a question Dalia has never considered, the taxonomy of his fundamental nature. Out of nowhere she feels moved to approach him, suspecting as she does so that he might slip away. Yet he remains motionless, even as she looms before him. Impassive, his face pale marble.

  Dalia eyes the circular work table between the bench and window. Amid a scattered dust of dry herb powder rests a pewter-handled knife, an artifact discovered on the opposite side of the world, in a country that no longer exists. The blade was dull, after centuries buried. She had an artisan brighten the steel and rework the edge, so the blade was new again, razor sharp. If only Dalia herself could be restored in such a way as this, all physical breakdowns repaired, and the grime of age brushed away.

  She realizes another part of her is wondering if she might reach the knife before he’s able to guess her intent, but she dismisses the idea, and wants to change the subject.

  Though unsure how much she recalls of scripture, or how he might receive it, Dalia begins to recite. “I am the Lord, your God.”

  Belial stands to face her. “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.”

  She does as he commands, and they merge. This time, the ecstasy is very brief, but still adequate to justify a lifetime of devotion. How many are lucky enough to experience even one instant so perfect? The moment is everything, a taste of divinity, and also far too much to bear. Parts of her remain sore, overwhelmed and hyper-sensitive.

  After, she turns away, hoping she won’t be sick again. Her stomach heaves, and a deep, thrumming shudder spreads to every muscle in her body.

  The black liquid filling her stays down this time.

  Belial goes to the edge of the bed, still wildly disarranged and stained black, like some perverse flower of death. “You said this is the second time I’ve visited you. Have you forgotten the other time?”

  Startled, Dalia tries to remember. The part of her mind that seeks backward into the past is exhausted, or broken.

  “The first instance, we agree upon,” he begins. “I came to you in the stair, hidden from the rest. We remained many hours, teasing ever nearer, backing away and again approaching, until your capitulation was entire. Later, it was your idea that we go outside, and display our coupling in the grass before the broad windows, where all would hear your cries ringing out. So they would be unable to look away, and would have to see the truth.”

  Dalia remembers that evening and night, an encounter she has relived through decades of obsession, until at some point her mind must have relinquished it. Perhaps the pain became too great.

  “I remember,” she says.

  “So there would be no going back,” he continues. “I never took you, Dalia. From the first, you gave yourself over.”

  “It was my greatest moment.” She sighs, feeling ridiculous for asserting that she remembers moments enough to be able to compare.

  “And… the other time,” he begins.

  Does she really want to know? Her psyche feels tender, incapable of facing surprise, let alone shock or trauma.


  “All your years of wild roving, seeking truth, disconnected,” he continues, seeming intent on reading her reaction, appearing to enjoy her discomfort. “Entirely dispossessed.”

  She laughs, a bitter sound. “I’m still dispossessed.”

  “No. You’re immobile, not seeking or learning. How long since you last discovered the new? Always dare. Constantly strive. This sustains us.”

  She winces at a twinge in her belly, and looks to him. “A cure, you said?” So easily she sets aside her anxiousness to hear of their other meeting.

  “Let me see.”

  She sits on the bed, tries to lie back, but the pain makes her cry out. “It was better for a while. But now I can’t…”

  He stops short of approaching, lets her lie there. “And have they lacked in pleasures, or fallen short in sublimity, these lives of yours?”

  Even through the distraction of recurrent pain, Dalia can’t deny that her time has been everything he suggests. If she now finds herself burdened by any regret, it may be only the nagging fear that her path has not been her own, that she has been nudged in the direction of another’s agenda.

  “How will you ever know?” he asks, seeming to intuit her fears.

  She gives no answer, only writhes and squirms against the burning.

  “What do you want, then?”

  To answer this, Dalia needs no time to consider. “To see your true face, and feel your touch, unaltered by illusion.”

  She squeezes shut her eyes, trying to resist the rising pain, so she can’t see his reaction. He doesn’t answer right away, and when her pain lets up slightly, she wonders if this is his doing, a way of changing the subject.

  But finally he does answer, sounding surprised at one of her words. “What illusion?”