by Peter Roman
And if I couldn’t find a wealthy enough mark in my first visit, I’d just come back at night and raise the entire graveyard, so the village was overrun with the walking dead. Then everyone would pay me what they could after I knocked the souls back out of the zombies with a palm to the forehead and an amen, and I’d ride out of there with a heavy purse.
I know what you’re thinking, but it beats working for a living.
Besides, every now and then I would stumble across a real demon and get rid of it. So there’s probably some karma balance there somewhere, right?
No, I don’t think so either.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT
WHEN WE TALK ABOUT DEMONS
I followed the caller’s directions to a small gallery on a quiet street I won’t name to protect the innocent, if there are any. The rest of the street was low-rise apartments, a coffee shop and a dry cleaners. There weren’t any other galleries in sight, and I’d never visited this place in my rounds. So much for me being the mysterious one.
The gallery had no name and no hours or any other information listed on the door. In fact, the door was locked when I arrived and I had to knock. While I waited for someone to answer, I studied the gallery through the glass windows. Paintings hanging on the walls instead of conceptual art. Landscapes and portraits of people who weren’t celebrities. Very old-fashioned.
So was the man who suddenly appeared at the door to unlock it. I hadn’t even seen him walk up. He wore a suit and tie and looked like he wouldn’t have been out of place in a bank. He opened the door and studied me for a moment.
“So you’re the one,” he said, before finally stepping aside to let me in.
He took me to the rear of the gallery, where the landscapes gave way to colour abstracts of the classic kind: some Rothko knockoffs, a piece that could have been a genuine Borduas if I didn’t know better, a couple of homages to Pollock.
There was also an espresso maker, which I mistook for a sculpture until the man made me an espresso with it. I liked this place more with each moment that passed. He handed me the cup and sat down behind a nearby desk with a dead plant on it. It was only then that he spoke again.
“My name is White,” he said. “Before we continue, I have a question.”
“I have one of my own,” I said. “How did you find me? I never visited this gallery.”
“A good dealer is always checking in with his contacts,” he said without changing expression. “You hear about the latest artists. You hear about what people are looking for.”
“And are other people looking for the same thing as me?” I asked.
“No,” White said, smiling a little. “That’s what caught my attention. A group of people looking for the same thing usually means people just following a trend. One person means someone with a true interest. A genuine collector.”
“I’m not a collector,” I said.
White shrugged. “And I don’t have what you’re looking for,” he said. “But I can help you find the person who does.”
“You said you had a question,” I said.
White nodded. “I’m not your average dealer,” he said. “And I have contacts most people don’t have. I’ve heard things. A man looking for the Mona Lisa no one knows about. A man who isn’t what he seems to be, or even what he once was. A man who should be dead. And let’s not even talk about the angels for now.”
We studied each other for a moment. I wasn’t entirely convinced he was human. Then again, I wasn’t entirely convinced he wasn’t human either. My daily dilemma. I decided to get straight to it.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I want to find out if you’re who I think you are,” White said. He pushed the dead plant on his desk toward me, then leaned back in his chair.
I looked at the plant, then back at him. He didn’t say anything.
I shrugged. I didn’t normally like to show off what I could do in public, but it seemed a moot point in this case. I reached out and brushed my fingers against the plant’s dead leaves, just long enough to let some grace flow into them. The plant’s leaves unfurled and it turned green again, and stood straight up, and generally did the sort of things plants usually only do in the movies. Then it was my turn to wait.
White pulled the plant to him and stared at it for a moment. Then he touched it, feeling the leaves with his fingers. He finally looked back at me.
“So, who needs the exorcism?” I asked.
“I do,” White said.
I finished the espresso and pushed the cup back to him. “I’ll have another,” I said. “This time with whiskey. Actually, make it light on the espresso.” I had a feeling I was going to have to fortify myself a little for this one.
I wasn’t surprised to see he had a small bar hidden away in a cupboard over the espresso machine. Anyone who works in the arts has a hidden bar somewhere.
I waited until he finished the drink, and then I swallowed that in a couple of gulps and relished the burn.
“So, when you say you’re the one who needs an exorcism . . .” I said.
“I’m not really me,” he said. “I’m a ghost or something.” He waved his hand through my chest—and I mean through it—and I felt a chill inside me.
“Stop that,” I said, and he withdrew his hand. I was surprised to discover he was a ghost, but I wasn’t surprised he was able to take on physical form and make espresso and such. It’s just a matter of expending some energy, much like the way I use grace. Use too much and you’ll become incorporeal and drift away until you’ve recharged enough to take on physical form. Most ghosts are actually a little like me.
“A demon took over my body,” he went on. “It forced me out. And then it bound me here and left.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear that either. Most ghosts are souls who for one reason or another have lost the connection to their body. Demonic possession is one of the main causes, but there are others—most of them worse.
I got up and grabbed the bottle of whiskey to refill my glass.
“Tell me about the demon,” I said.
“It was in a painting I acquired a few years ago,” he said. He took me through a door at the back of the gallery, into a small room the size of a storage closet. It may have actually been a storage closet at one point. But now it held a painting on an easel in the centre of the room. A pentagram was drawn in chalk on the floor around the painting, and there were faded outlines of other ritual shapes, as well as some books in a pile in one corner. I didn’t need to look at them to know they were books on demonology and summoning and that sort of thing. Nonsense for the most part. You couldn’t write that stuff down—too much of the process involves things going on in the moment. Demons are very moody creatures, so you have to tease them into coming to you. It’s a little like fishing actually—more art than science.
But I didn’t bother telling White that, because I was studying the painting. It was unremarkable—a Rembrandt knockoff of Christ driving a demon from a man lying in a bed in a dark room. I didn’t recognize the demon—it was black and scaly and all claws and fangs, and they seldom look like that. Usually they’re a little more Lovecraft in appearance.
The Christ didn’t look anything like me either, but they seldom do. Artistic licence, I suppose.
The key thing to note about the painting was where the demon was going as it left the body. It was headed for a painting on the wall within the painting, its canvas hidden by a curtain. Cute.
“Who’s the artist?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” White said. “I was unable to find a signature anywhere on the painting, although there was a burned area where one might have been.” He pointed to a scorched area at the base of the bed that I had initially taken to be a shadow.
“I tried to restore it,” White said. “The demon was bound within the painting and something I did released it.”
This wasn’t the first time I’
d heard of a demon in a painting. Many artworks have souls, and some have demons. Some even have both.
“It went down my throat,” White said, not looking away from the painting. “It forced me out. And then it told me I couldn’t leave here until I was dead. But I’m already dead. Look at me.” He waved his hand through the painting.
“It meant your body,” I told him. “It bound you here to keep you from interfering with it while it uses your physical form.” I didn’t add that it had probably done him a favour by locking him to the gallery. Ghosts running around loose usually bring problems down on themselves. And attract things far worse than ghosts.
“I couldn’t do anything but watch it walk out the door,” White said. “Watch me walk out the door.”
“Where did you get the painting?” I asked.
“A regular of mine found it in an abandoned villa on some land he bought in Tuscany,” White said. “He shipped it to his home here, but he couldn’t sleep once he hung it. He said it made noises.”
“What kind of noises?” I asked.
“Muttering, groaning, sighing. Like there was someone in the place with him.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
White looked at me and smiled a little. “I may be a ghost,” he said, “but I’m still professional enough that I respect the privacy of my clients.”
I nodded. Fair enough. “I don’t imagine you know where this demon went with your body?” I asked.
White shrugged. “I had an apartment. It may have gone there. But it’s been a couple of years now.”
I sighed. “Just so we’re clear,” I said. “You want me to track it down, exorcise it and put you back in your body.”
White nodded. “That’s my price for the information you want.”
I took a long drink of the whiskey. If he were human, I would have just beat the information out of him. But ghosts were trickier to work with. It might actually be easier to find the demon.
“All right, give me your address,” I finally said. I waved my glass at the pentagram and books. “And stop trying to call the demon back on your own. You may end up summoning something worse.”
And then I went out in search of White’s life.
The address White gave me for his old place was a brownstone a dozen blocks away. I bought a couple of things at a store on the corner and then made my way over there. It was an apartment building. I picked the lock to the front door in under thirty seconds using a pen and a trick a man in an English prison had taught me a few years back. It’s really true what they say about jails being training grounds for criminals.
Inside, I went up to the top floor and then did the same thing to the lock on the door at the end of the hallway. White’s apartment. Only it wasn’t White’s apartment anymore. It was a woman’s apartment now. There were photos of her with her friends on all the walls, and the couch and bed had the sorts of pillows only women would buy. I checked all the rooms but there was no one home. Definitely no demon wandering about in White’s body.
But he’d been there in the past. I did a reading, much like psychics do—the real ones, at least. I saw traces of him flicker in and out of existence around the apartment, spectral, like the ghosts that used to be in the old black and white shows on television. Only these were memories instead of ghosts. Everything has memories, even apartments. You just have to know how and where to look for them. One night when I was in Madrid, everyone had the same dream of walking down an alley and finding a secret door that led to . . . well, you really had to be there in the dream. Let’s just say it wasn’t our dream, it was the city’s.
But White, or rather the demon, hadn’t stayed in this apartment long. I watched him move around the place in the past, looking at the furniture that had been here then, which was all Art Deco stuff. He studied the paintings on the walls, which were more knockoffs that didn’t match the furniture at all—Renoir and Degas, that kind of style. Not to my tastes and I didn’t imagine they were to the demon’s either. Maybe he was looking for someone he knew in them.
He faded away and then it was just the present furniture again. The woman’s apartment, not White’s. I switched rooms and found the demon once more, in the bedroom. He was putting on a shirt and tie. A metal name-tag that said Carver. Interesting. It looked like the demon—Carver now—had a job. When demons possessed someone they usually abandoned their hosts’ jobs and went on sex and murder sprees. They didn’t usually go looking for employment. I wondered what it was up to.
I lost the demon again and found him by the door. The rooms were all empty of furniture now. Carver took one last look around and then left the apartment. I went to the window and looked out into the street. I saw a moving van outside. It pulled away and Carver got into a car—a sensible, practical sedan.
Mystery upon mysteries.
I took a last look around the apartment like Carver had, but there was nothing left of him now. There was just the woman’s photos and pillows, and likely her memories if I cared to look at them, which I didn’t.
I went outside and back down to the street. I did a fresh reading and watched Carver drive away in his sedan, fading away at the intersection.
I needed a vehicle.
I touched the door of a nearby minivan and used a little grace to pop the lock, then got behind the wheel and used a little more to start the engine. I’d learned how to hotwire cars in jail too, but the corner store didn’t sell those tools. And I never was very quick at that.
I drove to the intersection and stopped, looking for signs of Carver. A flash of the sedan speeding away, disappearing into the traffic of the here and now. I followed, but I couldn’t find another sign of him, so I kept driving, turning down streets at random, crossing bridges, cruising parking lots for hours, until the minivan ran low on gas. I pulled into a station and filled up and paid for it honestly. A gift to the vehicle’s owner.
I caught another glimpse of Carver on a street of fast-food restaurants, driving the sedan in the opposite direction. I pulled a U-turn in the street, waving at the other drivers who hit their horns, and followed, directly behind him. He flickered in and out ahead of me, his hair growing longer and then shorter, his shirt changing colours. I was watching his life change over what looked like years. At one point he wore glasses but then they disappeared. Eye surgery, I guess. The sedan became a BMW sedan. It looked like he’d picked a good job.
The more we drove, the more frequent and solid the sightings became. Which meant this was a regular route for Carver. It occurred to me I might see him for real, so I did what stretches I could while sitting behind a steering wheel and tried to get in the right frame of mind for an exorcism. Whatever that might be.
The sightings stopped at a bank tower in a business district of other towers and cafes. Everything was closed because the office day was over and the sky was fading to amber. I didn’t realize what Carver’s destination was until I no longer saw him ahead of me. Then I doubled back and went up and down the street until I saw the parking lot by the bank tower, the memory of Carver’s BMW in the lot. I pulled over and parked on the side of the street and looked around until I saw the spectral Carver walk through the front doors of the bank building with a shoulder bag and disappear in the lobby inside.
So. This was where Carver worked.
I checked the clock in the minivan’s dash. 7:10. Carver—the real Carver, not the memory one—was probably home now, wherever he lived. I just had to use the same tricks to retrace his route to find that home. To find the demon.
I pulled back onto the street and kept driving.
I found Carver—the real, present-day Carver—in a commuter neighbourhood outside the city, a subdivision of houses and trees that looked just like the advertisements you see in magazines. Carver lived in a house that looked the same as the other houses on the street, the only real differences being the colours they were painted. There was a tricycle in the driveway,
behind the BMW, and a white cat in the window that watched me pull into the driveway. I got out and stretched some more, and then the front door opened and Carver walked out with a bottle of beer in his hand. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and sandals. And a wedding band. He looked at me for a second like you’d look at anyone you didn’t know pulling into your driveway. Then I saw the end of the world pass across his face.
He reached back and closed the door behind him, then took a drink of his beer.
“I figured you’d come for me one day,” he said. “I just didn’t think it would be in a minivan.” I didn’t know how he recognized me. Maybe we’d met before and I’d forgotten him. Maybe demons had their own secrets. It didn’t matter. What mattered was why I was here.
“I walk in mysterious ways and all that,” I said, walking across the lawn to him. I stopped a few feet away. I didn’t want to push things just yet. Not here.
“Yeah, like the tax people,” he said. He looked up at the sky, then up and down the street, and frowned. “Not exactly the way I pictured the end,” he said.
“It’s never the way you imagine it,” I said.
We watched a dog run down the street, trailing a leash behind it. There was no one else in sight.
Carver drank some more of his beer and studied me.
“I’m living a quiet life,” he said. “I’m not hurting anyone. I have a wife and a daughter. A three-year-old. A good job. People depend on me. I do my part for them. For society.”
I shook my head. “This isn’t your life,” I said.
“It is mine,” he said. He spread his arms wide to take in the yard and house. “I made it. It wouldn’t exist without me.”
“Sure it would,” I said. “It’d just be someone else in that body, that’s all.”
