by Alia Bess
He disappeared and Victoria sank to her bed in relief. She snuffed her candle and crunched the tip of the incense. She got up and smeared the chalk circle with her foot for good measure.
Shrewsbury would have to wait another day. She needed to talk to Mr. Magnus.
But that night she was awakened by something heavy pressing down on her. She opened her mouth, thinking she would be greeting her demon, but a hand covered it.
Not her demon. But it was a demon. He held her down and lifted her nightgown and then her knees. She kicked hard and twisted, trying to break his grip. She could feel his demonic cock against her inner thigh, waiting for her to be still enough for him to thrust it in. She would not be still. She twisted and rolled and bit the hand that was over her mouth. The cock got closer and the tip burned her as it pressed between the folds of her cleft. She bucked her hips as hard as she could and braced one toe on the foot board and pushed. The demon cock pulled back slightly, just enough for her to know it was completely out of her. She kicked again. There was a flash of light in the room. The demon disappeared in a sulfur haze and she was free. She lay there panting, relieved.
“Don’t do that again.” A man’s voice spoke from the shadows near her closet.
She sat up and touched her lamp. It was Mr. Magnus. She blew a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”
“I am not God, but I will accept your thanks.”
“How did you know I needed help?”
“I was told you had summoned another demon, even after Jasper warned you not to. I came as soon as I could. I had to drive all night. Like I said, don’t do that again, Victoria.”
“Don’t summon demons?”
“Don’t summon the ones you don’t know. Marple sent a friend tonight.”
“You mean a ‘feind’.” Victoria arranged her nightgown around her knees and moved to the side of the bed.
Mr. Magnus laughed. She saw he had a long stick in his hand that he now tucked into his sleeve. “Yes. You are funny. And you have what my generation calls, ‘spunk’. I can see why he loves you so much.”
Victoria cocked her head, “Who?”
“Why, your demon, of course.”
This revelation made Victoria’s cheek twitch. “Demons can’t love,” she said softly.
“You are correct, and perhaps I should amend my statement. He wasn’t always a demon. None of them were. The man he was loves you.”
This made a little more sense. Victoria felt good about being loved, and this explained her demon’s persistence, but not his intent. “Please tell me what is going on here. At first I wanted to stop the demonic visits. Then I didn’t. Then when he stopped visiting I wanted to go to him. Now he won’t let me. Surely you know what is going on.”
“I do.”
“Then tell me.”
Mr. Magnus pulled up her chair and moved the bits of underwear and her pink bra aside before sitting in it. “I can’t tell you in the same way that if you had asked me, ‘Mr. Magnus, please teach me Japanese before I have to go to Tokyo next week.’ I could tell you enough to say please and thank you and where is the restroom, but you would be lost in conversation.” He looked at her kindly. “Do you understand? It’s not that it is forbidden, or that we don’t want to help you. It is just that it is impossible to be conveyed the way you want it to be.”
She nodded. “He had said the same thing, though he said it was more like he could not eat for me when I’m hungry.”
“But he could hand you a sandwich, and that us what he has been doing.”
She looked up sharply. “The sex visits? Like handing me a sandwich?”
“Well. Yes. At first he came to you as a demon that looked like the demons in your fairy stories. Am I right?”
She nodded.
“Then slowly he began to look more human.”
“Yes.”
“He had to convince you that something supernatural was happening, that it was vitally important, that you paid attention and that you were not insane. Quite a mission, if you ask me. I am impressed with his work.”
Victoria thought about that. ”Why couldn’t he appear like the angel Gabriel and tell me, ‘Here is an important message, Victoria.’? Why the sex?” She squirmed a little, looking at her hands in her lap and remembering some of the explosive orgasms. Sometimes his, sometimes hers.
Mr. Magnus was blushing when she looked up at him. “Have you read much about sex magic?”
“Not really. I wasn’t planning on having sex with Jasper or the harpy or Marple. Or even Marple’s fiend, as you clearly saw. When I discovered my demon was an incubus I stopped looking for other answers.”
Mr. Magnus nodded. “Well, he is not an incubus,” the old man said.
Victoria tilted her head. “How do you know so much about him?”
He smiled sadly. “He asked me to come here and I did. He asked me to explain what I could and try to keep you away from Shrewsbury.”
“He took me to Shrewsbury, himself. Why do I have to stay away now?”
The old man appeared troubled. “He did not explain everything, but it seems that something happened there some centuries ago that is causing problems in this one. He is trying to work it out.”
“Does the sex have something to do with time travel?” Victoria leaned over and took a notepad and a pen from the drawer in her nightstand. Mr. Magnus sat up straighter and assumed the demeanor of a professor. “Tell me,” she said, pen poised.
“Yes and no. The sex is how he is able to connect with you between the planes of existence. Once connected, he can use that tether to your reality for time travel or shape-shifting or any other thing he needs in this world of physical forms.”
Victoria wrote that down. “And the shape-shifting?”
Mr. Magnus nodded. “That has to do with how you perceive him, not so much what he actually looks like. If he appeared here now,” they both looked around the room as if he might, “you might see him as the Roman soldier, and I might see him as the red demon with the ram’s horns.”
“No kidding,” she murmured as her pen scratched the paper. “So which one is really him?”
“They are all him. The forms are like clothing you choose to wear based on your mood and the occasion. He selects a form based on any of his previous lives or places where he has lived. Including Hell.”
“Previous lives,” she wrote, “Like reincarnation?”
“Right. Though it appears he is selecting forms from lives he once shared with you, rather than others. Probably so you will recognize him.”
The pen stopped. Victoria looked up. “With me.”
“Right.”
“Recognize him.” She remembered his exasperation with her and how he was constantly asking if she remembered. “Shit.”
Mr. Magnus blushed again. “Right.”
“Am I just so stupid?” She shook her head. “I am not usually so dense.”
He nodded. “Not stupid, Victoria, but something is keeping you from remembering and apparently it is important that you do.” He looked sad. “Was important,” he amended.
“Why did he stop coming?”
“That’s just it. He tried and tried, but you did not see him. You made progress. He stopped seeming like a monster or a fairy-tale demon to you and started to look like a man. You allowed him to begin speaking to you. Until you saw him as a human being he could not communicate except through sex.”
“And then he stopped,” she reminded him.
Mr. Magnus moved to sit beside her on the bed. He took her hand. “You are not to think you have failed, Victoria. This is hard for anyone, and doubly hard for someone who has no background in the occult.”
She let him stroke her hand, but frowned at the tone of his voice. He sounded just like the preacher did when he talked to her mother after her father died. “What do you mean,” she asked slowly.
Mr. Magnus sighed. “He was trying to reach you from across that great chasm between life and death. This is possible, but both love
rs must extend their hands. You would not give him your hand. He stopped trying. Or he was stopped.”
She took her hand back. “Lovers.”
“Yes. He was your lover. Is. Had been. Many times.” Mr. Magnus smiled kindly. “Always. Forever.” Then his smile faded. “But no more. He failed to help you remember, and now you are lost to him. Forever.”
Victoria felt a twinge of sadness and wondered at it. “He told you tell me this?”
“No. He told me to tell you to stay away from Shrewsbury. I told you what I know about him from his touch, to help you understand.”
“I wonder what is in Shrewsbury.” She took her hand back and rubbed them together for they had become chilled. She thought about the man, the Roman, the Norseman and the blacksmith. She wondered how many more forms and histories and lives there were. “I liked them. They were handsome and interesting. If they had asked me out now I would date them. But I don’t remember loving them.”
“That is the whole issue, here, Victoria. You don’t remember loving them. Him.”
“How can I? Do I need to be hypnotized?”
Mr. Magnus appeared startled. “No. Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“You become susceptible to suggestions from the beliefs of the hypnotist and it may lead you farther away rather than closer.”
“I see. Then what should I do?”
“Nothing. It is over. Welcome your sister and her little family into your home. Enjoy the financial security he has provided for you. Try to have a nice life, Victoria. Say good-bye. He will not trouble you again.” Mr. Magnus got up from her bed and adjusted his clothing. “I leave you a parting gift.” He took a book from one of his wide sleeves and set it on the nightstand. “Good bye.”
She almost expected him to leave in a poof of sparkling smoke, but he left like normal people do, through the front door. She stood at her window and watched him walk to his truck and listened to the sound of the diesel engine rumble and the sway of the panel truck as it backed out. She watched him drive away. Then she watched the empty road for a long time before she picked up the little book and looked at the title.
A Tale of Two Cities. She had read this one in high school. Dickens again. She frowned as she turned the pages. This book was about love. Every book is about love if you think about it. Victoria set the book down again, remembering the story. It was also about resurrection. Have a nice life, he had said. She felt herself getting angry. Have a nice life? Her life was far from nice, and financial security only made her worries go away. It didn’t make her life nice. What the fuck did “nice” mean anyway. She grit her teeth.
Her whole life seemed to be spent in a dream. Her memories were of a person moving from one event to another day by day. She had friends she met for coffee, and the wilder ones she met for tequila shots weekends. She had lovers. Sex partners, she corrected. Men who came over and messed up her sheets and her bathroom and left hair in the sink and then just…left. The others she sent away.
Her jaw started to hurt and she realized she was grinding her teeth. She had never been in love. With anything or anyone. She went to school to learn the most boring profession of all, accounting. Her friends were boring. They only wanted to discuss the latest thing on television or in the malls. The men she casually fucked were more interested in their own gym memberships and their video games than in her. Nice life indeed.
When she tried to think of her life in terms of whether it was nice or not, she saw herself putting the good parts and the bad parts in columns just like she did at work with debits and credits. She needed a life accountant. She smiled grimly. What other people considered a nice life was one free from worry enough to allow them to engage in even more selfish pursuits. Her wealthiest friends were the ones who spent the most time shopping and clubbing and hours at the salon talking about themselves. Her less fortunate friends spent their time doing more interesting things, and talking about things and events rather than people.
She tapped the book on the nightstand. I will not go back to bed and wake up in a nice life, she promised herself. She marched over to the chalk circle and drew another one next to it. It wasn’t midnight. There was no incense. There were no more shoes. Instead there was a burning desire to get to the bottom of her visitations. She felt the heat of Hell behind her eyes as she scratched the symbol in the center. She wanted Marcus and Jack and Torgal. While she browsed the latest fashions they were dying over and over again. While she lay in a soft bed and complained to herself about being lonely, they were calling for her to help them. The thought of a nice life filled her mouth with the nasty taste of a skinny latte, tall with nutmeg sprinkled on tip and finished with the snotty glare of an underpaid barrista. She pointed at the center of the circle and growled, “Jasper!”
The monkey demon appeared as though he had been dragged kicking and screaming through a keyhole. His big eyes recognized her and before he could tell her “no”, Victoria had him by the throat and spat, “Shrewsbury. Now!”
She was ready for the flash. She stood outside the familiar thatched cottage. She looked down at herself to make sure she was not still in her nightgown. Good. She wore a simple woolen dress to her ankles and a thick useful apron tied over the front of it. And no wonder. At her feet was a wicker basket filled with wet linens. It must be laundry day. She bent to pick it up and was surprised at how heavy it was. Natural fabrics were much heavier than cotton or polyester. There would be no silk here. At least not on the body of a blacksmith’s wife.
She did not have to be told where the clotheslines were. They were strung between trees on the south side of the cottage. She carried her basket there and bent to lift and hang the sheets. Her hair fell forward and she saw it was very dark. I must be Maggie, then, and not Victoria. She straightened and pulled the long braid out from behind her and looked at it with interest. She lifted her skirt and lifted a leg to look at her foot. She was wearing a soft leather shoe and thick knitted stockings. She heard the clang of metal and turned. The forge was on the north side of the cottage. She grinned and trotted around the house to see him. Finally. Jack.
There he was. He had two young men with him. They had to be assistants. Only a master could have apprentices. He was still a journeyman. She watched him raise the hammer and bring it down on something. Horseshoes, probably. He didn’t look up. Of course not, she told herself. He sees me every day. She tried not to look as excited as she felt. Another clang and another. An assistant carried fresh water in a wooden bucket and poured it into the barrel where he quenched the metal.
He lifted the horseshoes with the long tongs and submerged it quickly into the water. He held it there a minute as a bit of steam drifted up, then lifted the horseshoe and eyed it carefully before handing the tongs to the assistant. He turned back to the forge and nodded to the other man who used the bellows to make the coals glow.
Victoria felt she could watch him work forever. He was stripped to the waist. His back and shoulders moved constantly, the thick muscles under his bronzed skin relaxed and contracted as he lifted the heavy hammer and brought it down. He glistened with the sweat of exertion and with the heat of the forge. She squirmed. She wondered why she had been forbidden to come to Shrewsbury. She was starting to feel an excited twinge that her brain told her was happiness. Maggie had a nice life. This was nice.
Maybe the laundry basket and what it implied was not so nice. She might miss electricity and washing machines and hot showers and movies, but she was willing to trade them for Jack. She was his wife. They were a team.
She wondered if she was responsible for feeding his men. She glanced at the sun. It was mid-morning. There didn’t seem to be any sounds coming from inside the cottage. He had assistants but it appeared she did not.
Reluctantly she turned from the forge and went into the dim cottage to get her bearings. Something was already simmering in the big iron pot suspended over the fire. The bed had been neatly made against one wall. A long table dominated the cente
r of the room. Benches were pushed neatly under it, though the table was full of many items. She could see a sewing basket, various pieces of crockery, some broken leather harness needing buckles, and a stack of folded cloth which reminded her that it was laundry day.
She returned to the south side of the house and finished hanging the sheets on the ropes. She breathed in the clean air, free from industrial pollution, though she didn’t need to turn her head to know where the barn was. The sky was clear and the sun was warm. She bent to pick up a pillowcase and wondered how laundry was dried when the weather was bad. I will learn, she told herself as she stretched to hang it over the rope.
“You can’t stay here.”
She looked down. Jasper had a sad face.
“You have to go,” he repeated.
“I will not.” Victoria was firm. “I know what I am doing.”
“No, you don’t.” Jasper glanced over his shoulder.
“I don’t want to go back. Ever.” She certainly wasn’t going to go back before the end of the day. She imagined the assistants leaving to go to their homes at nightfall and Jack coming onto the cottage for his supper and for her. She glared at Jasper. “I am not.”
“Something bad will happen if you stay,” Jasper insisted. “Please go home.”
“I am home.” Victoria looked at the tidy cottage and the vines of ivy and tiny roses that climbed over the stones and into the thatch of the steep roof. This was a fairy tale house. With a fairy tale man. She nudged Jasper away from her skirts with her foot. “Go away. I am enjoying this.”
The monkey demon glowered at her. “I like you, Victoria. I am only trying to help.”
She pointed at him and he ducked. “Go.” He did. She turned back to her laundry. Then she weeded the garden, then she stirred the soup, then she swept the cottage. She fed the three men their mid-day meal when they tromped in, tired and sweating. They ate in silence then went back out. She cleaned up, folded cloths, and learned to use a flatiron. She rubbed the blisters on her fingers as she waited for Jack to come in for his supper.
She fed him, sitting across the wood table watching as he ate his soup and the coarse bread she found in a basket near the hearth. She would have to learn how to bake bread. She wondered if she practiced back at her other house with her other stove she could come back here knowing how to do it right. She had a book on artisan bread baking on the shelf in her kitchen. Either way, she smiled to herself as she moved around the cottage, lighting oil lamps and the tallow candles as the sun set. Jack went out to the barn to tend the animals for the night and she closed and barred each of the shutters on the windows, pausing at the window where she and Torgal had spied on the lovers on their wedding night.
