“You do not understand,” he said.
“No,” Liz answered, close to hysteria, “I don’t. Why do you hate us so much? Why do you torture us? What have we done to you?”
“Mistress Pemberton, you are loved,” said the voice, sounding to Liz almost startled. “Yours is the race of the chosen. You have the gifts.”
“What gifts?”
“All of them.” The eyes flew about the trees, seeming to stare in many directions. Again, the voice wavered, coming from all directions. “It is what makes you so loved and so envied. What do you not have? You have all the gifts of the earth. You can create and destroy. You have knowledge of good and evil and can choose. You have will. All these things that we do not know. We are drawn to you like moths to a flame. We stand in awe of you. We were, you see, the instruments of the Eternal Will at creation.”
“We have death.”
“Yes, or you would be gods in your own right.”
The voice paused, and then said, “There are those among us who seek to possess you. Why do you think they wish it? It is not hate. It is to possess, if only for the briefest of moments, a taste of the life that glows so brightly within and around you. All that they desire, you are. That is why I created the keystone, so that I could be called to this world to serve, to be close to your light and participate, if even only a little, in your gifts. I am no more than a dog watching for the scraps you let fall from your table. All I wish is to please, to be of use and to be desired.”
“But you kill. You’re evil,” said Liz.
“No, I give. I give what you desire. You are the will and I am the key to its fulfillment.”
“No,” said Liz, growing angry. “You deceive. You lie and confuse.”
“To what purpose?”
Liz felt as though her head vibrated with the sound of his voice.
“To possess our souls,” she answered.
“Your soul?” The voice sounded surprised. “It is its own element. It is alien and apart from me. Even if I could take such a thing, what would I do with it? I am the servant, not the master.”
“I…” Liz hesitated. She sounded like a fundamentalist Christian. She’d never believed in any of it, not God or demons or souls. Yet here she was face to face with a demon or an angel, and it seemed the existence of one proved the rest.
Or did it?
And was she even really hearing this, or was it all a part of a madness that had overwhelmed her?
“Then serve me and let us go,” she finally said.
“You do not hold the stone.”
“Why do I need it?” said Liz.
“It opens the window so that I can serve. Through the stone, I serve the one who possesses it.”
“Why the stone? What is the stone?”
“It is the stone Cain used to slay Abel. Those were not their true names but it is how you know them. The spilling of first blood gave the stone its force. I took it and transformed it into a key. That key opens the window I use to serve the one who holds it.”
“You are more powerful than Morgan. Why serve her?”
“Because I am an instrument of her will.”
“You keep saying that,” said Liz, frustrated, “and I don’t understand!”
Again, the voice growled a sound Liz thought was a laugh, the eyes in the trees burning more brightly than ever.
“You cannot understand,” he said. “As best I can tell you, we are elementals. Like earth, wind, fire and water. My essence is fire. That is not quite exact, but it describes me in terms you can comprehend. I am one of creation’s first attributes and one element of its most primal nature.”
“Is there a God?” said Liz.
“There is creation.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Then you don’t understand the question.”
“How old are you?” said Liz.
“I cannot answer in any way that would have meaning to you. I am beyond time, and time is me.”
“Are you of this world?”
“I am of and beyond this world just as I am of and beyond time. As clearly as I can say this to creatures of your limited experience, there is a window I can only look into until someone uses the keystone to open that window and invite me through. But what you call earth is not fixed to me. It is… pliable. When admitted to your world, I can shape it.”
“That’s how you keep us here,” said Liz.
He was silent, the yellow lights flickering in the trees.
“Where is Beth? I heard her but she hasn’t returned.”
“I meant for her to return.”
“Then why hasn’t she?”
Agbado hesitated. “The animal. The dog. He leads her. It is harder to sway such minds.” The voice paused, then said, “They are not easily distracted.”
“If you keep them in the woods, they’ll die. Let her go.”
“I cannot.”
“Then you are a demon. You are evil and it’s just deception to say you’re not.”
“Mistress Pemberton, when you say these words I know they have meaning to you but they do not to me. To understand them you must have will and I have none. I am like nature itself. You could call fire good and water evil, but to me they possess no such qualities that I understand. They are, simply, what they are.
“I bind myself to the stone master to fulfill my nature, which is to love, and I express that love through service. But each serves according to his nature. Water cannot produce fire. Fire cannot satisfy thirst. It is not fire’s property.
“I open doors. When I do, what exists most strongly in you is fulfilled. What you call darkness and light both exist in you, not me. In all your kind I have observed that what you feel strongest you often keep secret. I set you free. If you call me a demon or an angel, you name yourself because I am the reflection of your own true nature, what lies beneath, and I am nothing more than a mirror. What you see is none of me and all of you.”
“But you kill. That is your action. We’ll die.”
“Yes, you will. You all do. It is your most precious gift. You are like fireflies in the evening, flashing for an instant and then forever gone. It is indescribably beautiful to watch. Immortality is a torment. We ache to be like you.
“We never die. We go on and on and on, always the same, never changing. And someday, when all of you are gone, we will have nothing left at all but the long night without your wondrous illumination to enthrall us. I will be an instrument without purpose and a tool without a master, never changing and never serving. You use this word, ‘hell,’ and although I do not understand it, I think perhaps this is what you must mean.
“But I do not kill. It is your nature to die. I cannot change that.”
“Liar!” shouted Liz. “If not for you, Kevin wouldn’t be nearly dead in that tent. If not for you, I would live for many years to come.”
“But no matter what happens here you will, in any event, die in what to me is far less than an instant in time. The difference is so insignificant, what does it matter?”
“It matters to me,” Liz said. “It’s my time, not yours.”
“I only serve. That you die is your nature and that you die now is the will of the stone master. I am in awe of your radiance and only want to touch it, feel it and know it. You have so many gifts.”
The eyes flamed bright and appeared to come as close in from the trees as they were able.
“Would it not please you to give this one gift to me?” the voice said. “This small piece of time that you willingly sacrifice to me? It would be the first ever given to me, and the memory of it will live forever. That will be my gift to you. I will love and remember your sacrifice for eternity. It is as much of immortality as I can give to you, since you seem to desire it. It is something I will always be able to hold even in the darkest night long after the last of your race has vanished and every last star in the heavens has been extinguished.”
“Leave me alone!” shouted Liz. “Don’t touch me. Don’t
open any of my doors. Leave us be and go back to where you came from. To hell with your damn excuses. I love Kevin but you never open the door to that. Instead, I’ve nearly killed him. I love Beth and yet I struck her. I could never have done those things. Never. You only open me to anger and hate. That is not my choice. What you do is not love. It is rape.”
“But the anger is in you, Liz Pemberton. You know this is true.”
“Bullshit! I hate you. You’re a curse and I hope you rot in hell where you belong.”
The eyes appeared to recoil from her. “I love you. You are almost a god to me. I only serve.”
“You disgust me,” spat Liz, her fear drowned in a towering rage. “You’re a parasite. Love? You don’t know what it is. All you want is to feed, to steal away someone else’s life so that your own pathetic survival has some heart to it. It’s a violation and you’re repulsive. Leave us alone.”
The very air around her roared. As alien as Agbado was, Liz could hear absolute despair in the wail. This sound did not waver as before, but was so loud Liz covered her ears. Doing it, however, did not reduce the volume, and she felt as though her head might explode.
The flame in the campfire geysered into the air, bright sparks shooting into the trees. Liz fell back from the intensity of the heat and smelled the raw odor of her own scorched hair. She crawled along the ground away from the heat, the fire so bright she was blinded.
Her left hand touched something that burned her, like placing her palm on the red-hot element of an electric stove. She jerked it back, screaming with pain.
“Why are you chosen?” Agbado’s voice roared inside her head. “Why are you made different? You don’t deserve it. You answer love with hate. You are worshiped and you curse us for it. You are showered with gifts and complain only of what you do not have, wasting all you do. You know good and evil and you choose evil. Since the days of Cain, when there is peace you have always turned to violence and then cry out that you suffer. If I had tears I would weep at your blindness!”
Liz felt raw hot anger light up her mind, her fever returning stronger than before. It was him, she knew, opening the door to her anger. Yet it really was her, also. This was her rage, born of her frustration and hate, and he was calling it out. The knowledge made her all the more furious.
She rose up, pressing her hands to her temples to stop the storm in her head. “Get out of my head, motherfucker! Get the hell away from me. Leave me, you bastard. Go now! I order you out.”
The roaring in her ears abruptly ended. She fell to the ground gasping in the sudden silence. She blinked, her eyes still blinded by the former light.
She felt a rush of agonizing pain in her left hand. The skin was already blistering from the burns. What had she touched, so far from the fire?
Chapter 8
The anger Liz felt beat at her, eroding her will to resist it. Despite her exhaustion, the pain in her hand kept her from sleeping and her head spun from the agony of it. What had she touched? A burning ember thrown from the fire, or something else? Agbado?
The pain and anger together made her feel she would go mad. She checked on Kevin and found him still unconscious, maybe in a coma. His heartbeat felt fast and uneven.
She wanted to shake him awake. He had brought this on her. It was his damn responsibility to help her. All these years he’d done nothing but screw up her life. Why had she loved him in college? After he’d dumped her, she went with the next guy who was decent to her, one of his friends. Yes, it had been to punish him. She’d wanted him to feel the sting of it. She married Alex in the end not knowing what else to do, loving him a little but never like Kevin.
Then Kevin had met and married Morgan. Why Morgan? When you offended Morgan, and it was impossible not to offend her, her reaction was inevitably a campaign of unrelenting emotional scorched earth. It was no surprise to Liz that, by finally leaving her, Kevin had provoked a poisonous act of vengeance. Even without Agbado, Morgan was capable of taking extreme measures against Kevin for his “disloyalty.” Maybe she understood better now why Morgan acted that way, after Kevin’s story of parental abuse, but the knowledge did not help Liz. With Agbado to open the door to Morgan’s personal closet of bile and rage, it was no wonder the bitch was here torturing them all, even her own daughter.
She hated Kevin for all his stupidity and gutlessness. Her husband had died of cancer but even that seemed Kevin’s fault just now. If he’d married her, none of this would have happened. None of it.
“None of it, you stupid son of a bitch!” she shouted out loud at him. “You stupid, stupid man. Why did you ever matter to me? What an asshole you are, and what a jerk I am.”
The venom poured from her, all the hate she felt but seldom admitted even to herself. “I’ll kill him,” she said, breathing heavily and wincing from the agony of the pain in her left hand.
Get out of the tent, she told herself. She slid to the entrance flap and the metallic glint of the knife caught her eye. She hesitated a moment, then snatched it up. She looked at Kevin and knew she must leave and do it now or she might not be able to control what happened next. She pushed herself through the flap.
Outside it was growing light again. The dense fog still hung over the lake, but the sky directly overhead was clear, the last of the auroras fading in the brightening daylight.
Still, the rage stormed in her, only now it focused on herself. Why had she come? She had no business being here and never had. How stupid could she be? Her whole life was nothing but one bad decision after another. Loving Kevin, marrying Alex, not having a child when she could have, going into nursing and all the stupid men she’d let use her. She could not at that moment think of a single thing she’d done right in her whole miserable life. Now here she was, old, lonely and futureless. Agbado had said she had choice. What a liar. What choice did she have? She could die of hunger and exposure or she could kill herself.
Any way she looked at it, her life was finished. In fact, she realized, it had been over for sometime now. Dead woman walking. Just one meaningless affair after another, and few enough even of those now that she was older and less attractive. Fuck men, she thought. They all want a younger woman. She would never find anyone worth a damn.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a writhing pain in her hand as she accidentally knocked it against a tree. The sheer agony sent her to her knees. She dropped the knife and gripped the wrist of her injured hand with the other so tightly her knuckles turned white. If she could have, she’d have torn the whole arm off, anything to stop the searing torment. The morning light revealed that the whole of her left palm was blistered.
She crawled on her knees to the water and thrust the hand into the lake. The cold brought some relief, but it quickly faded.
Where was Beth? she wondered. Couldn’t that girl do anything? If she couldn’t find her way out of these Godforsaken woods, at least she could get back and be of some use here.
“Beth!” she shouted. She stood, still holding her left hand. “Beth! Hampton!”
She listened. She heard once again the odd, high-pitched wavy sound of someone calling, both far away and yet somehow close. She could not make out the words but again recognized Beth’s voice, even as distorted as it was.
“Beth, I can hear you. Come on back!”
The sound faded again. Liz called several more times but heard nothing in return. Agbado does not want her back now, she thought. Not now. The bastard has me right where he wants me. I’ll go mad here alone. Kevin will die and I’ll go mad and drown myself in this Godforsaken lake.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it, you bastard!” She picked up the knife and waved it in the air at the trees. “You sick son of a bitch, come out and do the job yourself, you pathetic fuck.” She staggered against a tree in a fit of rage and despair, weeping and groaning in pain. “Maybe you don’t know evil,” she hissed between sobs, “but I do. And you are it. All your meddling in our heads. Just stay out of my damn mind, you rapist bastard.”
&nbs
p; A clicking roar answered her, seeming to radiate from the trees.
“Don’t like that? I bet you don’t, you freak. Creation should have tossed you out as a botched job. Flushed you down the cosmic fucking toilet and started over. You hear?”
Silence, but Liz could feel him out there.
“That open any doors for you? Huh?”
The inside of her mind was an angry swarm of stinging bees. Every wrong ever done to her and every wrong she’d done to anyone else flooded back to her. A grand parade of all the loathing she had ever known. Voices from the distant past taunted her again. The laughing faces of the men who had left her. The blank face of the child she’d never had. She beat her temples with her fists to stop it. She had to find release, no matter how.
She ran into the trees. She didn’t know where. She didn’t care. She simply ran, tripping on moss and roots but somehow keeping her balance.
“Agbado,” she screamed, “where are you, you bastard?” She screamed it again and again. Focusing her fury on him kept her mind free of the pain in her hand and shoved her other, personal demons to the back of her mind.
She found herself at the camp again and wheeled back into the woods. “Oh no,” she yelled. “You’re not playing this game with me, you bastard. Not today.”
A few minutes later she was back in the camp. She didn’t care. She’d keep running and yelling until she dropped from exhaustion. She charged again into the trees, screeching incoherently. In some dim recess of her mind she knew she’d slipped into madness, but at least it was shelter from the storm in her head.
She heard something. Not Agbado, but something animal. She staggered against a tree, listening. It was barking. The dog, she thought. Her pal, Hampton. Somehow, she felt, she would be better if he was with her. She could never be angry at him.
“Hampton,” she called. “Hampton, come here to me. Come on, boy.”
He seemed to materialize from the trees in front of her, leaping through the underbrush.
The Demon Stone Page 21
