The Demonologist (11 page)

She
. Are most therapists women? Or could I possibly know this guy? A guy who knows both me and O’Brien?

“She doesn’t gamble,” I say.

“No? Well, you know what they say. Can’t win if you don’t play.”

He leans his arms across the back of the pew. It brings a whiff of recently applied deodorant. A crude perfume meant to cover the earthy scent beneath it.

“I don’t mean to pry, but you look a little lost, my friend,” he says.

He offers a look of real concern. And then it comes to me: He’s one of those street missionaries. A recruiter for the church in civilian clothes, prowling the pews.

“Do you work here?”

“Here?” He looks around, as though noticing where we sit for the first time. “They got
jobs
in here?”

“I’m just not up for a sales pitch for salvation. If that’s what you do.”

He shakes his head. “What do the T-shirts say? ‘You’ve mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.’ I just saw a kindred spirit sitting here and thought I’d say hello.”

“I’m not trying to be unfriendly. I’d just prefer to be left alone.”

“Alone. Sounds nice. Hard to find a moment’s peace where I live. Pandemonium. A man can’t
think
. And believe me, friend, I’m a thinker.”

That word again. The same one O’Brien used to describe Grand Central. Milton’s hell.

Pandemonium
.

“I’m David,” I say, and offer my hand. And after a pause, the man takes it.

“Good to meet you, David.”

I wait for him to share his name, but he just releases my hand.

“Think I’ll be moving on,” I say, standing. “I just came in here to get out of the sun for a minute.”

“Can’t say I blame you. Personally, I’m an indoors cat.”

I make my way to the aisle and, with a parting nod, start toward the open doors. The day blazing beyond.

As I go, the man recites part of a poem in the pious murmur of a prayer.

O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams

That bring to my remembrance from what state

I fell

Milton. Writing Satan’s words.

I turn. Slide along the pew to where he sits, his head now lowered, hands reverently clasped. Grab his shoulder and give him a rough push.

“Look at me!”

He jerks away in a defensive reflex. Winces up at me in anticipation of a blow. Not the man who was sitting here a moment ago. A priest. Young and clean-shaven, his skin blushed in alarm.

“I’m so sorry,” I start, already backing away. “I thought you were someone else.”

As I make for the aisle again, the young priest’s expression changes. His surprise turning to a smile.

“I’m ready to hear your confession,” he says.

His laugh follows me all the way out onto the street.

I
T WAS THE VOICE AGAIN
. I’
M SURE OF THIS AS
I
LURCH AWAY FROM
St. Agnes’ to Lexington and lean against the doorway to an Irish bar, catching my breath. It was the same presence that passed from me to Tess, that spoke to me on the rooftop of the Bauer. Quoted from
Paradise Lost
just as the man in the church just did. And the Thin Woman, too, though I’m less sure she was an incarnation of the voice herself—the being I have started to think of as the Unnamed—rather than an on-the-ground, human representative. For some reason, I had to travel to Venice, to Santa Croce 3627, for the Unnamed to be introduced into my life, and it was the Thin Woman’s job to see to it that I accepted the invitation to do just that. Which would suggest she didn’t work for the Church or one of its agencies as I suspected.

O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams

In Milton’s poem, this is Satan speaking. Cursing the light of day as a painful reminder of his fallen state, of all he’d lost in his self-imposed exile in the darkness. Is that who the Unnamed is? The Adversary? The man in the chair—or the plurality of voices speaking through him—said it was not the “master” whom I would soon meet, but “one who sits with him.” In
Paradise Lost
, this would mean the fallen angels who formed the Stygian Council of ruling demons in hell, with Satan sitting as Chair. They were thirteen in number, each given distinctive personalities and skills by the poet. It would seem that the Unnamed is one of them. An originating demon, cast out of heaven. A being capable of the most convincing shapeshifting and mimicry, assuming human form—the old man on the plane, the drunk in the church.

Then again, perhaps these are borrowed shades of those who have already lived and died. Perhaps the Unnamed is limited to inhabiting the skins of those in hell.

It’s clear now. I have lost my mind.

Instead of grieving Tess head on, I’m creating gothic distractions, Miltonic puzzles, demon dialogues—anything but facing the unfaceable. I’m using my mind to protect my heart, and it’s a cheat, a dishonor to Tess’s memory. She deserves a father to mourn her, not construct an elaborate web of paranoid nonsense. I’m sure the shrinks have a term for this. Cowardice will do.

By the time I get back to the apartment and check my phone, more messages have been left for me, a couple notes of sympathy from colleagues at the university, and two grave warnings from O’Brien that if I don’t call her back soon, she’ll be forced to take matters into her own hands.

Why
don’t
I call O’Brien back? I honestly can’t say. Every time my finger hovers over the button to speed-dial her it loses the will to press it. I
want
to speak to her, to see her. But what I want has been negated by another purpose, an influence I can feel in my veins as an alien weight, heavy and cold. A tingly sickness that, above all, doesn’t want O’Brien anywhere near me.

And besides, I’m busy.

Opening the medicine chest and pulling out the bottle of Zolpidem that Diane left behind. I fill a glass of water and go to Tess’s room. Sit on the edge of her bed and, one by one, swallow the pills.

Suicide? And with sleeping pills? Chickenshit
and
cliché
.

O’Brien is here with me, but at a great distance. Easy enough to ignore.

Will I see you, Tess, when it is done?

Yes. She is waiting
, says a voice, neither my own nor O’Brien’s.
Go on, Professor. Sip. Swallow
.
Swallow. Sip.

I don’t believe what it says. Yet it’s impossible to resist.

Sip. Swallow.

SMASH
.

A framed photo falls to the floor. Shards of glass now winking
over the rug, lodged in the cracks between the boards. The nail still firm in the wall, the wire the frame hung on still intact and secure.

I know what photo it is, but I go to it anyway. Bend and turn it over.

Me and Tess. The two of us laughing at the beach near Southampton a couple summers ago. Below us, out of view, our sand castle being dissolved by the incoming tide. What’s funny are our hopeless efforts to save it, to buttress the walls with fresh sand, bail out the courtyard with our hands. The picture shows the pleasure in our being together in the sunshine, on vacation. But it also shows the joy in taking on a task with someone you love, even if that task is too great to be achieved.

“Tess?”

She is here. Not just in the memory the photo evokes. She was the one who pulled it off the wall.

I crawl to the bathroom. Stick a forefinger down my throat. Empty my stomach of tap water pinkened by tranquilizers. When I flush it away, the heavy thing in my blood goes with it.

For a while I lean against the tiled wall, my legs out before me. If I don’t move, it’s easy to pretend this isn’t my body. There is no order I could give that would make any part of me move.

Find me
.

I’m being the old David again, the man of inaction Diane was probably right to leave. Because there is still something to be done. An impossible task, admittedly: find and retrieve the dead—or half-dead—from darkest limbo.

And then there is the matter of not having any idea how to begin.

I stand under the shower fully clothed. Feel the bookish references and snippets of poetry slide off me like oil. Soon there is nothing left.

Except for the feeling I’m not alone.

My eyes open against the spray of hot water. Steam fills not only the glass-walled shower stall but the whole bathroom, so that the room is alive with billowing fog.

Nothing there. But I stare into it just the same.

And watch Tess come out.

Shaking with hunger, with fear. Her skin bruised by cold. Reaching out to me but stopped by the glass. Her palms as darkly lined as ancient maps.

“
Tess!
”

She opens her mouth to speak just as a pair of arms slips around her and pulls her back into the fog.

Arms too long, too grotesquely muscled to be a man’s. Blackened by hair thick as fur. Their claws soil-stained as a beast’s.

O
NCE
I’
VE CHANGED INTO CLEAN CLOTHES AND AT LEAST PARTLY
cleared my head, I get the digital camera the physician gave me in Venice and download the footage I recorded of the man in the chair onto my laptop. The reason I do this occurs to me only after I’m done.

This is important.

I don’t know why yet. But it was the one thing the physician insisted on.
For you.
So whoever was giving him his instructions wanted me to have it. To train the lens on the man in the chair and record what he said, what he did. Why else give me the camera at all?

So what
did
the man do and say?

I watch the recording on my laptop’s screen. Its reality pulses out at me in the way that even the most vivid news clip or documentary has never done before. A physical blow to my chest that forces me back on the sofa. And it’s not just the disturbing sounds and images that do it. There is something about the effect the recording has that is distinct from its content. How to put it? An aura of the pain from which it originates. A subliminal glimpse of chaos. A Black Crown.

There are the voices, the words, the tortured writhings of the body. But the only thing I write down in my notebook is the list of cities and numbers the voice said would be of relevance on April 27th. The day after tomorrow.

New York 1259537

Tokyo 996314

Toronto 1389257

Frankfurt 540553

London 590643

The presence offered this as a piece of what is to come. A snapshot of the imperceptible future that, if correct, would prove its skills, its power. Its reality.

As the recording continues, I close my eyes when the man’s face changes into my father’s. It doesn’t prevent me from hearing the old man’s voice.

It should have been you.

As awful as it is to interpret his words, I can’t help feeling he means something even worse than his wishing I’d drowned instead of my brother.

Rewind. Again. Eyes open this time.

I watch his image on the screen and know, inarguably, that it is my father speaking to me from wherever he went after we buried him. And he is revealing a secret that I can’t fully understand yet. An invitation to seek him out, nearly as irresistible as Tess’s.

When the recording is finished replaying, I close the laptop and return it to its leather travel bag. Then I wrap the camera in an old jewelry bag of Diane’s and put them both inside a briefcase. I think of simply placing it on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, but something tells me it requires more care than that. There is no hiding place in the apartment good enough.

I start out with the briefcase, with the absurd idea of going to a pawnshop and getting a pair of handcuffs so that I might attach the handle to my wrist. As I walk, however, I come up with some
better ideas. What I need to do is stash it where even I won’t be able to access it until after the 27th, when the prediction it contains can be proven true or false without any question of my tampering with it.

Do they have safe deposit boxes big enough for a briefcase? Here’s the thing about banks I learn over the next three hours: They have safe deposit boxes big enough for a sedan if you’re ready to pay.

And they’ll do more or less anything else for money, too. For instance, whether you have an account or not (I choose a Midtown main branch I’ve never entered before), they will place your belongings in a box in a vault that can only be opened by way of a numerical code of your own devising. They will bring in a silver-haired senior partner at a prominent law firm to prepare a document ensuring no bank employee or manager will allow anyone—including myself—to access the box until after April 27th, then have the manager sign it and register copies with the bank, the law firm, and an envelope for my pocket. They will provide a written guarantee that the box will not be opened for at least ninety-nine years unless either myself or someone with my signed permission and the numerical code shows up. They even offer you a cup of reasonably decent coffee while you wait for it all to be done.

On the way home, I put in a call to a guy I know in the IT department at Columbia. After some roundabout, isn’t-this-heat-a-bitch chat, I ask him some questions. In particular, I want to know if it would be possible to alter the time a video download is registered to have occurred on a hard drive after it’s happened or, alternatively, to make any record of the download having happened go away.

He pauses, and I imagine the internal dialogue in his mind:

Q: Why would a professor of literature want to know that?

A: Porn.

Eventually, he answers no. It would be “pretty damn difficult” to erase a download entirely or make one saved on the 25th look like it
happened on the 28th. “Stuff like that always leaves fingerprints,” he says with a verbal wink, a warning for the next time I want to grab something nasty off the Internet without the wife finding out.

What I don’t tell him is the wife is gone. And that I don’t want to erase my download. What I want is to ensure that the time I transferred it from the camera to my laptop says the same thing as the date and time recorded on the footage itself: that the document reflects events—and spoken cities and numbers—that occurred
before
April 27th.