Demon's Door (17 page)

Jim looked around. The bedroom walls were clustered with all kinds of souvenirs and oddities, like Venetian carnival masks and drinking horns and mirrors with frames made out of seashells.

The bedroom smelled strongly of some industrial-strength perfume, which Jim couldn't identify, but he could tell that it had musk in it, and bergamot. If he had been asked to give it a name, he would have called it Democrat Congressman's Mistress's Boudoir.

Summer bounced into bed and patted the quilt next to her. ‘Come on. We don't have all night.'

Jim sat down on the side of the bed and said, ‘You're sure about this?'

‘Jimmy, you're a college teacher. If I can't trust you, who can I trust?'

‘OK,' he said. ‘So long as you're sure.'

He swung his legs around and pulled up the quilt to cover himself. Summer switched off her bedside lamp and they lay side by side in darkness. Outside, the wind continued to whistle and fluff, and somewhere a wind chime was jingling wildly, as if hundreds of Buddhist monks were hurrying down the road with their
tingsha
cymbals.

After a long while, Summer turned toward Jim and said, ‘Are you asleep, Jimmy?'

‘Nearly,' he told her. Then, ‘No.'

‘So what is it, this thing that you're so scared of?'

‘You wouldn't believe me if I told you.'

‘Try me. My last boyfriend said that I would believe anything.' She paused, and then she said, ‘He was right, I guess. I truly believed that he wasn't cheating on me with that fat Mexican waitress.'

Jim said, ‘The thing is, Summer, I can see all kinds of stuff that other people can't see. I nearly died when I was a kid, and ever since then I've been able to see ghosts, and spirits, and demons.'

‘You're
kidding
me! You're kidding me, right? Like
Ghost Whisperer
?'

‘Not really. Not at all, in fact. Ghosts and spirits usually hang around because they have a bone to pick with somebody who's still alive, or else they don't realize that they're dead, so most of them are either vindictive or stupid.'

‘You're kidding me, though, aren't you? Come on – you can
really
see ghosts? What do they look like?'

‘Pretty much like they did when they were alive. Less substantial, I guess. The only difference is, nobody can see them. Except me, of course, although I'm sure there must be at least a handful of other people who have the same ability.'

‘But that thing in your apartment?'

‘That's not a ghost, that's a demon. When it first appeared last night, it looked like a woman in a black hat and a veil. But it grew bigger and bigger, until it looked like some enormous kind of animal, like a wolf or a fox.'

‘You
are
kidding me, aren't you? I mean, you're just saying this to scare me, like one of those campfire stories.'

Jim shook his head, although he knew that she couldn't see him in the darkness. ‘I think it's a Korean demon, and that one of my new students is involved with it somehow. Maybe he brought it here. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe the demon has taken control of the student and is using him as kind of a front man.'

‘So – let me get this straight – upstairs in your apartment – there's an actual real actual demon?'

‘That's right. Maybe it's gone now, but take my word for it, it was real enough when it appeared at the end of my bed, and I wasn't going to take any chances.'

He told Summer everything, although he tried not to make it all sound too melodramatic. He told her how Charlie's head had been bitten off. He told her about Maria and all her cuts and bruises. He told her how Tibbles had come back to life after being crushed, but was dead for a second time.

He tried to explain to her how the first day of the new semester seemed to have happened and yet not to have happened, but how several people had memories of it. Or feelings of
déjà-vu
, anyhow.

‘I had that once,' said Summer, nodding to show that she understood what he was talking about. ‘My mom took me to Disneyland when I was about seven and when we went into Mickey Mouse's house I was sure that she had taken me there before. But my mom swore to me that she never had.'

‘Well, you know what kids' imaginations are like,' said Jim. ‘You'd probably seen it in a cartoon, and fantasized that you were really there. When I was a kid, I convinced myself that I knew Huckleberry Finn, and that he and I used to play together and go fishing together, even though I didn't even have a fishing pole. He always used to thrash me at marbles.'

They lay in silence for a further few minutes, and then Summer unexpectedly reached out in the dark and flicked the tip of Jim's nose. Jim had been listening for any scratching noises from upstairs and it made him jump.

‘Hey!' he protested. ‘What was that for?'

‘Nothing. Just being playful, that's all.'

‘There's a Korean demon in my apartment and you're being playful?'

She leaned over him and breathed warm spearminty breath into his face. ‘You know something, you're such a great guy. You're great-looking, you're funny. You give off this what's-it's-name. This charisma. But it's like you're this old man already, when you're not.'

‘I'm older than you.'

‘I'm twenty-two, twenty-three next birthday.'

‘Exactly. And I'm thirty-four. That means I'm twelve years older than you are. When I was reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
you were still waking up three times a night for ten ounces of warm formula.'

‘Well, I couldn't forget that you're a teacher, too.'

‘Exactly.'

‘The trouble is,
you
never forget that you're a teacher, either. You seem to think that because you're a teacher nobody can teach you anything. Especially somebody younger, like me.'

‘No, I don't.'

‘Yes, you do.'

‘Don't.'

‘Do.'

‘OK, then,' said Jim. ‘I'm always open to new ideas. Why don't you expand my horizons for me?'

‘You really want me to?'

‘Sure. Go ahead. I can't sleep, anyhow.'

Summer switched on her bedside lamp. She climbed off the bed and said, ‘You go to a club, you see pole-dancing, you think there's nothing to it, just holding on to a pole and waggling your tush. Well, look at this.'

She took hold of one of the bedposts, hoisted herself up, and spun right around it with one arm flying free. Then she held on to it with both hands and jumped up, spreading her legs wide apart.

For the next three or four minutes, she spun and circled and even hung upside-down. As she clung on to the bedpost Jim sat up in bed watching her in amazement. The bed creaked and swayed every time she swung herself around, but she performed with such fluidity and grace that it was easy to believe that she was completely weightless.

Eventually she swung around one last time and landed on the bed, almost on top of him, so that he bounced up two or three inches. She was panting a little, but Jim was perfectly aware that if he had tried to copy her, he would have been ready for CPR by now.

‘You see?' she said, and kissed him. ‘And that was only round the bedpost. If you could see me with my proper pole . . .'

‘I'm speechless,' Jim told her. ‘I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.'

She kissed him again, and then again. ‘Every single move has a name. Like the first move I did, that was an Angel. Then I went into an Explosion. Then a Backwards Showgirl. Then the Full Moon . . . that was when I was upside-down and kind of curved – you know, like the moon.'

She kissed his forehead, she kissed his eyelids. She squeezed his cheeks together in one hand and kissed his lips. He did nothing to stop her. In fact, he began to kiss her back. She tasted not only of spearmint toothpaste but of pink lip-gloss, too, and her hair smelled of apricots.

‘You know what, Jimmy-wimmy?' she whispered, and her face was so close that she was out of focus. ‘When you drive out of that college every afternoon, you need to stop being a teacher and you need to be yourself. Every time you talk to me, you make me feel like I'm sitting at a desk. Try to find out who you are, because one day you'll wake up and find that you've been teaching for years and years and the only person who hasn't learned anything is you.'

Jim said, ‘You are wise beyond your years, my child.'

‘There you are, you see! You're still doing it! You need to forget about your poems and your quotations and all of that literature stuff. You can't go through your whole life talking with other people's voices, even if what other people said was exactly what you wanted to say but you just couldn't think of the words. Look at your T-shirt.'

Jim peered down at it. ‘It's Walt Whitman.'

‘I don't care if it's Walt Disney. It's not Jimmy Rook.'

Jim didn't exactly know why, but the way in which she called him ‘Jimmy Rook' gave him an unexpected feeling of pleasure and almost relief, as if ‘Jimmy Rook' were another person altogether – somebody much more relaxed and less self-conscious; somebody who wasn't endlessly harassed by ghosts and demons and anxieties about his students. He could imagine a whole crowd of young people hanging around a diner, and one of them suddenly saying, ‘Hey! Look who it is! It's Jimmy Rook! Hi, Jimmy!' and Jimmy Rook walking in, smiling and strutting and high-fiving, everybody happy to see him.

‘You're really somebody, Summer,' said Jim. He touched her lips with his fingertip. ‘I looked at you and I talked to you, but up until now I had no idea who you are.'

‘That's the whole point. You don't know who
you
are, either. Maybe it's time you tried to find out.'

She laid one hand on top of his shorts. His instinctive reaction was to take hold of her wrist and firmly lift it away. But she was right. She was much younger than him, but she wasn't one of his students, and tonight he wasn't the teacher. Tonight he wasn't the demon hunter, either. Tonight he was Jimmy Rook.

‘Goodness!' she said, in a little-girly voice. ‘I do believe there's something growing inside of these shorts!'

She gave him two or three squeezes, and then said, ‘I wonder if it's a beanstalk? I sure hope so. I could climb it all the way up to the clouds and find the giant's castle and bring back the goose that lays the golden eggs or whatever. You know how good I am at climbing up poles.'

‘Do you know what, Summer?' Jim told her. ‘You're nuts.'

‘Oh, no,' she said, in a deep, mock-serious whisper. She took hold of his waistband and tugged his shorts halfway down his thighs. ‘Look what I got here.
Your
nuts!'

It was a stupid joke, but they both laughed so much that they accidentally knocked their foreheads together.

‘Ow!' said Summer. ‘I shall have to spank you for that! Or spank your monkey, anyhow!'

She took hold of his hardened penis in her hand, her long manicured nails digging into the skin, and rubbed it slowly and lasciviously up and down. Jim lay back on the pillow and watched her, because all she wanted him to do was watch her. She was the teacher now.

She kept on rubbing him, gripping him so tight that the glans of his penis flushed dark purple, and the eye gaped with every stroke like a landed fish.

‘Now you can tell me a poem,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Tell me a poem. Go on.'

‘Summer, for Christ's sake . . .'

‘Tell me a poem or I'll stop.'

‘I thought you said I was supposed to forget about being a teacher.'

‘Don't tell me a poem like a teacher. Tell me like Jimmy.'

So, as she slowly rubbed him, he recited the next few lines of the Walt Whitman poem that he had been reciting to himself in bed.

‘
The early lilacs became part of this child, / And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, / And the Third-month lambs
—'

‘That's so beautiful,' said Summer, even though she didn't once take her eyes off his penis. ‘That could almost make me cry.'

Without another word, she dipped her head down and took his penis into her mouth, and very gently sucked it. Her fine blonde hair tickled his thighs, and he reached down and stroked it. He wanted to continue reciting the poem but he had forgotten it, all of it. Come to that, he had forgotten every poem he had ever known. He had forgotten
everything
he had ever known. The way that Summer was making him feel now, all knowledge was irrelevant.

He started to feel a tightening sensation between his legs, but it was then that Summer sat up, and licked her lips, and smiled at him, and crossed her arms so that she could take off her T-shirt. Her breasts tumbled out of it, and Jim could see that he had been right: the Lord
had
been magnanimous. They were enormous, but very buoyant, almost afloat, with pale strawberry-pink nipples, crinkled and stiff.

Jim sat up and pulled off his T-shirt, too. Walt Whitman's white-bearded kisser wasn't exactly a turn-on. He kicked his shorts off his ankles and took Summer into his arms. God, she felt like an angel. He nuzzled her and ran his fingers down the curve of her back and for the first time in a very long time Jim felt completely carried away, as if a huge warm wave had lifted him out to sea. No anxiety, no responsibility, nothing but soft skin and pleasure.

Summer started to sit up again, but Jim said, ‘My turn,' and firmly pushed her on to her back. He knelt beside her and tugged off her tiny white-lace thong. Then he parted her thighs and opened the freshly waxed lips of her vulva with his fingertips. It was like opening up some exotic pink fruit, filled with clear sweet juice. Her clitoris peeped out and he licked it with the tip of his tongue.