The Demon Stone

by Christopher Datta

  Something shifted again out in the trees. She felt it more than she saw it. For the thousandth time that day she asked herself how in the name of God she’d been convinced to come on this trip.

  “Do you have the stone?” said Beth.

  Kevin shook his head. “I swore never to use it again. I don’t really know that Helms would have won that election. Agbado might have lied to me. And even if she had won, two people still died. I hate Helms but not even she deserves what happened to her. I had no right to play God. I can only choose for myself. That’s what Bill did. He said ‘no’ to the demons. He made a stand even though it cost him his life. I just played Mosquito’s game. Who knows who that eighteen-year-old woman might have grown up to be? Who knows what backlash to Helms might have developed, a counter movement that would have brought us to our senses?

  “Now she’s a martyr and what she stands for is more popular than ever. How many more people was I going to have to destroy to stop women and men like Helms, and how much stronger and more popular might the killings have made them in the end? That’s the cycle of violence. That’s where it leads. Bill knew that. I should have.”

  “If you don’t have the stone, then why’s Agbado here?” said Liz.

  Kevin stopped. He stood up, and then sat down again looking confused and frightened. He frowned, glancing at Beth. “I don’t think you should know this, Beth,” he said at last.

  “You picked a hell of a time to decide I shouldn’t be on this trip,” Beth shot back.

  “I didn’t know it would come to this.”

  Liz thought he looked cornered and uncertain what to do next.

  “Come to what?” Liz said. “What happened?”

  “Beth can’t know,” he said to Liz, desperation in his voice.

  “It’s too fucking late, Dad!” Beth half screamed, standing. “Where am I going to go?” she said, waving her arm around the camp.

  Liz gently pulled her and she reluctantly sat back down.

  Hampton whined and Beth grabbed and hugged him.

  “Oh, Christ,” Kevin sighed. He sat a moment, holding his head in his hands and rubbing his eyes.

  “The day Helms was shot,” he said, his voice distant and quiet, “when I got home—stumbled home was more like it—I was in shock. I tore the pouch holding the keystone off my neck and shoved it into a desk in my study. Then I just sat in a corner of the room with the lights off and the curtains drawn. I hated myself for what I’d done, but like an addict I wanted to touch the stone again to draw from its strength. I needed it more than ever.

  “Agbado called to me. He told me I’d defeated Helms, just as I wanted. Why stop there? There was so much more to do.

  “I didn’t answer. I just sat, silent and brooding. On the second day I saw Bill again, just as I had when I was wandering away from the rebel camp in the night. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t need to. He simply sat and stayed with me. We both knew I had to break Agbado’s hold on me. Bill’s being there was the only thing that gave me the strength to cut Agbado off.

  “Agbado called me again and again. I didn’t answer. He pushed as hard as he could until my skin crawled with the need to go to him, but I didn’t. He pleaded. I ignored it. He called me a coward and a fool. He showed me new visions of what would happen to innocents if I failed to act. He revealed to me men more evil and twisted than I’d ever dreamed possible, men I could stop now before more victims died. That was the worst of all. The temptation grew so strong to act I several times nearly lost control. I’d walk back to the desk, my hand at the drawer, and then Bill would be there beside me with his hand between mine and the stone and I’d sit down again.

  “Agbado was finally furious with me. I had been chosen, he said. A great gift had been given to me only to be wasted. I wasn’t worthy of his love or his attention. He said I was worse than those who committed the crimes I’d seen because I had the means to stop them and I let them happen anyway. I didn’t care about anyone or anything but me. I was already dead and I was damned.

  “And then it was over and he was gone. As suddenly as the flick of a light switch he left me so completely that I felt as if the whole thing had only been a dream from which I was just awakening. Bill was gone, too.

  “I had been in the room for nearly four days, hardly leaving. I thought it was finally over.

  “It wasn’t.

  “Even then I wasn’t sure what had really happened. I almost went to look at the stone again just to know that at least it had been real, but in the end I didn’t. Real or not didn’t matter, I thought, so long as I was free of it. Most of all, I didn’t dare go near it from the fear that if I did the addiction would come roaring back and I’d have to go through the struggle to beat it all over again.

  “As I started to come back to myself for the first time since leaving Africa, I realized how much I’d withdrawn from my family. I’d barely spoken to anyone since my return. I could see that you, Beth, were confused and hurt, but you said little and spent most of the time with friends. Morgan, on the other hand, was suspicious and angry.

  “It was so hard being married to Morgan. She was intense and quick to anger. But as difficult as she could be, I knew that I was the only friend she trusted and could turn to, and did turn to many times during our marriage. We had that bond at the core of our lives, and I knew that she loved me and needed me to protect her in ways that she couldn’t protect herself.

  “But I could feel, after Africa, that the trust between us was unraveling. I told her the minimum about my trip and Bill’s death and I never mentioned Agbado. The loss of Bill was still too raw, and I was too confused about what had really happened to me. A part of me wanted to think I had just gone crazy for a time.

  “But another part of me knew better.

  “Morgan knew that I was not telling her the complete truth. She knew that my friends didn’t like her, and she was always mistrustful when I spent time alone talking to them, afraid they’d be critical of her. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy—the more suspicious and wary she grew, the more my friends didn’t like her. That fed her fear, which made her even more distrustful.

  “She was most afraid of Bill because he was convinced from the beginning that our marriage was a mistake and he never missed an opportunity to tell me so. It didn’t matter to Morgan that he was relentlessly critical of everyone. She deeply feared him and he brought out the worst of her insecurities. She hated it when I spent time with him and was furious when I decided to go to Africa.

  “And then when I got back and she sensed I wasn’t telling her the whole truth about Bill’s murder, her paranoia spun out of control. She couldn’t imagine what I was hiding so she decided that I’d betrayed her, and that everything that I’d said about what happened in Africa was a lie. She came to believe that Bill must still be alive and had come back to the U.S. with me. He was living somewhere in Minneapolis and meeting me in secret, waging his private war to get me to leave her.

  “By the time I’d finally freed myself from Agbado and began paying attention to what was happening, her suspicions were making her delusional. Like Bill in a way, she was taking a little bit of truth and turning it into a weird combination of reality and fantasy.

  “School started in the middle of all of this and I went back to teaching. It was a relief. Life began to go back to its old routines. Morgan ran her antique restoration business. Beth went back to school, too, and I stopped thinking about Bill. I stopped thinking about anything. I wanted to believe it had been an awful nightmare that was finally behind me, the result of drugs and malaria. I had gone out of my mind for a while from the shock of Bill’s murder, I told myself, but now I was better.

  “Morgan was cold and distant for a time, and whenever anyone called me, she often picked up another phone to see who it was and what we were saying. I caught her following me in her car one day when I went out to run errands. When I confronted her about it she again accused me of lying about Bill’s death. She was sure I was hiding
something from her. She was right that I was, but wrong about what it was.

  “By that time I had put enough distance between myself and the events that I could convince myself Agbado wasn’t real and that Bill had simply been murdered and that I had escaped. I had heard voices in my head when Helms was shot, but they were gone now and there was nothing more to say. I believed it, but I couldn’t tell Morgan. I felt she’d never believe me.

  “One Saturday I was grading papers when she came into my study to confront me. ‘I know that you’ve betrayed me,’ she said. She stood before me in a cold fury, shaking, and I stood up and tried to put my arms around her. She struggled against me but finally just stood stiffly in my arms.

  “I told her it wasn’t true.

  “She insisted it was. She said I’d lied to her about what happened in Africa and I was lying to her now. I was talking to Bill, who hated her and always had. She was sure he was trying to convince me to leave her.

  “I felt sorry for her and trapped. Sorry, because she was right that I wasn’t telling her the truth. Morgan is too smart to lie to, at least for me. And I felt trapped because it was too late to tell the truth. The truth was too fantastical for anyone to believe. I wouldn’t have believed me, either. But whatever chance there was that she might believe me had been shattered by what she correctly knew to be my evasions.

  “All I could do was say that when Bill was alive he’d criticized everyone, myself most of all. That had just been his way.

  “‘Then why do you see him?’ she demanded. ‘If you care about me you’d stand up for me. You wouldn’t see him anymore if you loved me.’

  “I told her again that he’d died and I’d never see him again.

  “She didn’t believe me. It was too convenient a lie. He’d come back from Africa and I was seeing him all the time. For weeks I’d hardly said a word to her. Bill was here and that’s why I didn’t want to talk. She knew exactly what was going on.

  “I told her again, almost in tears this time, that it wasn’t true. Bill really was dead.

  “‘Don’t treat me like I’m stupid!’ she screamed back at me. She said she knew I talked to Liz and she could just imagine what we said. She accused us of carrying on an affair behind her back. ‘Everyone close to me betrays me,’ she said.

  “I said again that this was all crazy, and I swore that Bill was dead.

  “‘I’m not crazy!’ she shouted back. ‘That’s what you and Bill and Liz all want me to think!’ She shook and she pounded her fists into my chest. I stood and let her do it. I was tired and just wanted it to stop.

  “Suddenly she dropped to the floor and curled up, sobbing that even her parents had betrayed her.

  “I knelt down and swept her up in my arms. She just hung there sobbing like a child. I asked her what she meant.

  “She didn’t answer but just clung to me weeping in the most desperate way. I sat rocking her and stroking her hair. I’d never seen her so miserable. For perhaps the first time in our life together, she seemed to have completely let go of the tight control she always forced on herself and everyone close to her. I could feel she had just given in to a despair that had haunted her all of her life, and that I had unintentionally provoked.

  “After a while I kissed her and she kissed me back. Her arms went about my neck and she pressed herself against me and we kissed for several minutes. It had been months since we’d made love and I began to unbutton her blouse.

  “I didn’t know what a mistake I was making. I thought it would bring us close again. It did the opposite. She violently pushed me away and scuttled back across the floor until she was pressed up against the wall, closing her blouse tightly in one hand and staring at me as though at a dangerous animal.

  “I felt defeated. In the minefield of Morgan’s emotions I’d made a misstep, although I didn’t know then how or why. I told her that I did it because I thought it was what she wanted.

  “She hissed at me that it was what I wanted, and it was always about me. We had a moment of closeness and I’d ruined it. I didn’t know what real tenderness and love was. Her face was livid with anger and fear.

  “I told her I thought we should make love. It’s what lovers do. I couldn’t help saying the last although I suspected it would only make her angrier. I was right.

  “She said that’s what love is to men, penetrating a woman. Fucking her. I couldn’t just hold her and share a moment of real tenderness. And then she spat out at me that I was just like her father.

  “I saw on her face that she hadn’t meant to say that last thing. I recognized that her control had slipped again. She looked furious with herself.

  “I asked her how I was like her father?

  “She turned her head and bit her fist, refusing to look at me.

  “A dark recognition crept over me. I pushed her, asking why unbuttoning her blouse was acting like her dad?

  “She snarled back at me that it was because he liked fucking her, too. She was just a kid and he fucked her every chance he got. She told her mother but she refused to believe her and didn’t do a damn thing. She called Morgan a liar and threatened to punish her if she said it again. She just pretended it didn’t happen. Morgan said she didn’t know which of them was more disgusting. ‘Everyone betrays me,’ she wept. ‘Everyone.’

  “I felt like I’d just been punched me in the stomach. I could hardly breathe. For a minute or two I tottered between thinking that Morgan was totally insane and believing her. She had become so delusional and strange that she might imagine that anything was true. But in my heart, I knew she had finally spoken the truth to me. It explained so much I had never understood—her coldness, her anger, her deep insecurity and her fear of intimacy.”

  “She was lying,” said Beth. “I don’t believe it. Grandma and Grandpa weren’t like that. I don’t believe it. Everything she said was a lie.”

  But to Liz, Beth sounded like she did believe it, and that it was crushing her.

  Kevin looked at her and sighed. “I didn’t want to tell you any of this,” he said. “I wish that none of this had ever happened. It’s more than you should know.”

  Liz put her arms around Beth and drew her close. Beth was shuddering with emotion. “He’s lying,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper.

  Liz did not think so. At least, not about Morgan. In light of what he’d just said, all of Morgan’s edginess, hostility and paranoia made sense. The child in her had been strangled by her father’s violation and her mother’s acceptance of it; it was little wonder that love and trust came so hard to her. Vulnerability led to violation and love led to betrayal. For the first time, Liz felt sorry for Morgan and wished she’d been kinder to her.

  “After that, things got worse,” said Kevin.

  Liz could feel he wanted to push ahead so he could get it out and be done with it. He’d come this far, and he was finally going tell the whole story.

  “Morgan got crazier,” Kevin said, “and it scared me. She avoided me. I urged her to see a therapist but she refused to even consider it. She said she deeply regretted ever telling me about her parents. It had just slipped out in a moment of anger. There was no point in dragging it all out again. It was the past, she said, and was over and done with. She didn’t want to talk about it to anyone ever again because talking changed nothing.

  “I told her it wasn’t the past. She lived with the hurt of it every day. I could see that. It was like an infection that needed to be treated or it would devastate her life and our marriage.

  “‘You’re my infection,’ she said. She told me to just keep my distance, and that I could tell Bill to go to hell the next time I talked to him. She couldn’t think of anything bad enough to do to us. She said she wished we’d contracted some awful disease in Africa so she could watch us suffer from it like she suffered from us.”

  Kevin stopped a moment. Liz knew he was struggling, and finally he said, “I should have known what was happening, but I didn’t. I was miserable and paralyzed and
I blamed myself. I thought a lot about suicide because I felt trapped and responsible. There was no way to reason with Morgan anymore, and she made me feel useless. She was right that I had betrayed her and let her down. I didn’t know how to reach her, but if I left her I would finally betray whatever bond still existed between us. There was really only one thing that kept me going.”

  He looked up at Beth, who had her face turned away from him. “That was you, Beth. I kept going for you. I know I was a mess and had little to give you, but I gave you what I could from what was left in me. I hope you can understand that because I know what this has done to you.”

  Beth did not say a word but sat with her head on Liz’s shoulder and stared dully into the fire.

  “I should have known what was happening,” Kevin repeated. “I didn’t because I was exhausted and depressed. Several weeks later, on a Saturday, Morgan disappeared with the car. I didn’t think about it because we were hardly talking by that time. A few hours later I turned on the television to catch the end of a Vikings football game. They were replaying a news clip about a breaking story in the town of Redwing, just south of Minneapolis. There were scenes of a street full of emergency vehicles and reporters. The police had surrounded a small, ranch-style house. I immediately recognized it. It was Morgan’s parents’ home.

  “A reporter was explaining that the house was the scene of a homicide. Someone had called 911 and reported a murder, and when the police arrived, a voice from inside the house threatened to shoot them. As I watched, a policeman using a bullhorn called for the person inside to surrender.

  “An old woman stumbled out the front door of the house. The camera zoomed in on her face and I could see it was Morgan’s mother, Bea, and she was covered in blood. Her expression was cornered and confused, but most of all furious. She stared into the camera, although it was far enough away that I doubt she could have seen it. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and she couldn’t see well without them. But it was like she knew it was there and her eyes bore into the lens and out of the TV into the homes of every person who watched her, and the expression on her face seemed to say, ‘Go to hell. That’s where I’m headed.’