The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (17 page)

So. This was where Carver worked.

I checked the clock in the minivan’s dash. 7:10. Carver—the real Carver, not the memory one—was probably home now, wherever he lived. I just had to use the same tricks to retrace his route to find that home. To find the demon.

I pulled back onto the street and kept driving.

I found Carver—the real, present-day Carver—in a commuter neighbourhood outside the city, a subdivision of houses and trees that looked just like the advertisements you see in magazines. Carver lived in a house that looked the same as the other houses on the street, the only real differences being the colours they were painted. There was a tricycle in the driveway, behind the BMW, and a white cat in the window that watched me pull into the driveway. I got out and stretched some more, and then the front door opened and Carver walked out with a bottle of beer in his hand. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and sandals. And a wedding band. He looked at me for a second like you’d look at anyone you didn’t know pulling into your driveway. Then I saw the end of the world pass across his face.

He reached back and closed the door behind him, then took a drink of his beer.

“I figured you’d come for me one day,” he said. “I just didn’t think it would be in a minivan.” I didn’t know how he recognized me. Maybe we’d met before and I’d forgotten him. Maybe demons had their own secrets. It didn’t matter. What mattered was why I was here.

“I walk in mysterious ways and all that,” I said, walking across the lawn to him. I stopped a few feet away. I didn’t want to push things just yet. Not here.

“Yeah, like the tax people,” he said. He looked up at the sky, then up and down the street, and frowned. “Not exactly the way I pictured the end,” he said.

“It’s never the way you imagine it,” I said.

We watched a dog run down the street, trailing a leash behind it. There was no one else in sight.

Carver drank some more of his beer and studied me.

“I’m living a quiet life,” he said. “I’m not hurting anyone. I have a wife and a daughter. A three-year-old. A good job. People depend on me. I do my part for them. For society.”

I shook my head. “This isn’t your life,” I said.

“It is mine,” he said. He spread his arms wide to take in the yard and house. “I made it. It wouldn’t exist without me.”

“Sure it would,” I said. “It’d just be someone else in that body, that’s all.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the closed door, then took me by the arm and walked me back to my car.

“Is that what this is about?” he said in a low voice. “The body?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

“I own it fairly,” Carver said. “He broke the bonds and freed me.” He let go of my arm at the side of the minivan and shrugged. “I’m a demon,” he said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“I understand,” I said, and I did. “But it doesn’t matter. The man you took the body from has something I need. And you have something he needs. I’m sorry, but you know how this has to end.”

He looked at me for a moment longer, then looked back at his house. I gave him the time. I’m sometimes stupidly generous that way. I say stupidly because a few seconds later the front door opened and a woman came out holding the hand of a young girl. They wore matching dresses with floral prints, and I swear I could smell cookies baking somewhere behind them. It was the stuff dreams are made of. It took me a few seconds to notice the phone the woman held in her other hand.

“Ray, is everything all right?” she asked.

Carver turned and smiled at her. “Just a friend from work,” he said. “I have to go in to the office for a few hours.”

She looked at me, then back at him.

“You promised,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Carver said. “It’s a bit of an emergency.” He looked back at me. “Isn’t it?”

I could see it in his eyes. He knew what was going to happen, and he didn’t want it to happen here, in front of his family. Fair enough. I didn’t want that either.

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s a real emergency.”

The girl took a step forward. “My story, Daddy,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Carver said. “I’ll be back in time to tuck you in.”

Now it was my turn to look up and down the street. Anywhere but at them. I tried to tell myself I was doing this for the better good, but I wasn’t even sure about that.

We got in the minivan, Carver still holding his beer, and I took us away from there as fast as I could. Neither one of us looked back. I’m not sure if it was easier for me or for him.

“Ray Carver?” I said. “Seriously?”

He shrugged. “I like his stories,” he said. “They looked like the sort of world I’d be comfortable in.”

I shook my head. “Why couldn’t you just be a serial killer or a pope or something?” I said. “That would make things a lot easier.”

“I’ve done all that,” Carver said. “I wanted to see what the mundane life was like. I wanted the things your kind always want. The job. The big house. The family.”

“Those things are never what you think they are,” I said. I didn’t tell him he could have run and hid if he hadn’t tied himself to those things. If he’d stayed on the move, I probably would have lost his trail eventually.

“It was worth it,” he said, so softly I may have imagined it.

What could I say to that? I knew how he felt.

I turned randomly at intersections, taking us down one tree-lined street after another, deeper into the heart of suburbia. I was lost in no time, but it didn’t matter. I was just trying to find someplace quiet and private to finish our business.

“Is there any chance we can work out a deal so I can go home and read my daughter a bedtime story?” Carver asked. “Maybe I’ve got something worth more to you than whatever he has.”

I shook my head. “Only if you know where Judas is,” I said.

Carver sighed. “So that’s what this is about.”

“That’s what this is about,” I agreed.

“Would you believe me if I told you I knew where Judas was?” he asked.

“Maybe when I thought you were a demon who’d possessed an innocent man’s body,” I said. “But not now that I know you’re a banker with a family and a mortgage. You and Judas don’t move in the same circles anymore.”

He chuckled. “Fair enough,” he said. He finished the rest of the beer in one swallow and put the empty bottle in the minivan’s cup holder. Then he threw himself at me with all the fury of a hellspawn.

I should have been on guard for it—he was a
demon
, after all—but the whole family and suburbs business had lulled me into relaxing. I barely had time to throw up my arm to protect my face when he came at me, punching and snarling. He let his true form show now, his fingernails hardening into claws that raked skin from my arm while his eyes blazed fire—real fire.

There are wards and binding spells and glyphs and such that you can use to keep demons at bay in a pinch. The problem is they’re very personal in nature, and you have to know a lot about the demon in question for them to work. I didn’t even know Carver’s real name, let alone his genealogy, so I had nothing on him. Someone really needs to do a set of demon trading cards someday.

On the plus side, while the exorcism ritual would take some time to put together, he didn’t need to be conscious for it.

I let go of the steering wheel and used my left hand to shield my face while I threw a couple of quick jabs at him with my right. It was an awkward angle, but I had a hard jab thanks to some time I spent in a boxing gym with no name in an old warehouse in Louisiana. Carver’s head went back so hard he cracked the passenger-side window behind him.

But he lunged at me again just as quick and latched onto my hand with his fangs, and I screamed and started hammering him with my left to get him off. If his wife and daughter could see him now.

I finally knocked him off my hand, but he took my pinkie with him, choking it down like a gull eating a French fry.

“God
damn
you,” I yelled.

“I am going to devour you piece by piece,” he laughed. “And then I’m going to let the pieces simmer in my stomach for the next thousand years.”

Yes, the demon in him was definitely coming out now.

Then he screamed and clutched at his stomach, and now I couldn’t help but laugh at him. “Holy blood stings a little more than holy water, doesn’t it?” I said, and gave him a few more jabs with my mangled hand to get as much blood as I could on him. It probably hurt me more than him, but it felt good doing it. I don’t think anybody had actually eaten one of my fingers before.

He snarled at me and grabbed onto both of my arms. “I
feed
on pain,” he said.

Ah, he was that kind of demon.

We both opened our mouths to exchange more witty banter, but then the minivan went off the road and hit something on account of no one driving it. We went through the windshield still holding each other.

We didn’t hang on to each for long, though, as he collided with the tree the van had wrapped itself around and I continued on my way, coming to a stop on somebody’s front lawn.

I lay there for a moment or two, considering the crows circling overhead in the clear blue sky, and then I felt myself to see if there was anything broken. There was, but nothing I couldn’t heal with a bit of grace, and so I went about that and then got to my feet and looked for Carver before he could get away.

As it turned out, there was little chance of that. He was lying on the crumpled hood of the van, his arms and legs bent in ways that I’d seen enough times to realize there was no hope for him. Or maybe I was the only hope. But I’d never know, because just then Carver left White’s body and tried to take over mine.

I had time for a glimpse of White’s body shuddering as it gave out a death rattle, and then a glimpse of movement in the corner of my eye. I didn’t bother trying to look at it. You can never really catch sight of a demon when they’re out of a body, unless they’ve found a way to manifest in their real forms. The less said about that the better.

If they can’t manifest, though, they head straight for the nearest living thing. Which in this case was me.

I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu—a sure sign a demon possession was under way. I lashed out with my hand, still mangled and bleeding because I hadn’t gotten around to fixing it yet—and caught Carver by the throat. As much as you can catch a wisp of smoke by the throat anyway.

“I don’t think so,” I told him.

He writhed in my grip and I burned some grace to keep him there while I looked around for someplace to put him.

There. One of the crows had landed in a branch of the tree and was studying White’s body like it was a buffet. I threw Carver at the crow—
into
the crow—and it let out a squawk and launched itself into the air. I muttered a few quick words it’s wise not to share and sealed the outside of the crow in a layer of grace to keep Carver in it. The crow fell from the air and bounced off the roof of the minivan to the ground. It scrambled to its feet and looked around, then glared at me.

“Better learn to fly,” I advised him. “Before the cats in this neighbourhood find you.” And I flicked some more blood on him from my ruined finger for good measure.

Carver cawed in what I assumed was an indignant tone, then hopped away, opening his wings and battering them against the ground.

You’d be surprised how many crows are actually demons.

Granted, he’d be a problem again when the crow hit the end of its natural lifespan and freed him with its death, if he didn’t get himself killed first. But I can’t fix everything that’s wrong with the world.

I went over to White’s body to see what I could do, but it was too late. The body was dead, which meant White was really a ghost now.

If I had more grace, I could have tried a resurrection, but I didn’t have enough of that left after raising the princess and binding Carver into his new home. I had failed.

A crow laughed at me from atop a streetlight. I didn’t see Carver anywhere on the ground now, so it could be him up there. But it could be any other crow too. That’s just the way crows are.

People were starting to come out of their homes to look at the accident scene, some with phones in their hands. It was time to move on before the difficult questions began. I laid my hand on White’s forehead and said a few words that didn’t have any power to them, then got the hell out of there.

Maybe if I’d stayed with Penelope in that cabin in the woods and never left things would have been different. Maybe we’d still be living there now. Maybe, but I doubt it. I don’t believe in happily ever after anymore. I’ve lived too many lives for that.

Penelope and I hiked out of the woods and to a farm where she’d left her car. It took us three days. We camped in clearings where we could look up at the sky as we fell asleep. It looked like there were more stars than people on the earth. Maybe there were.

The farmer was a woman who lived alone with three daughters dressed in boys’ clothing. There was a grave marked with a simple cross in the yard. Chickens ran back and forth across it.

Penelope paid the farmer for keeping the car, a rusting Ford Model A. We had to clean animal droppings out of the inside before we loaded it up with Penelope’s gear. If the woman thought it odd Penelope came out of the wood with a man she hadn’t gone in with, she didn’t let it show. She didn’t let anything show on her face. It was that kind of age.

We drove down to San Francisco, passing shanty towns beside the road here and there, and people walking in the middle of nowhere, dragging suitcases behind them. No doubt all their worldly belongings. From dust we came and to dust we shall return.

We stayed at a hotel in San Francisco. We rented two rooms, because that was the proper thing to do. We ate in restaurants and I bought new clothes for myself with some money I lifted from pockets here and there. I read the newspapers and that’s how I discovered the world was at war again, although it looked like things were winding down in Europe. I wasn’t surprised. I’d known Hitler was going to be trouble from the moment he got in power. I’d seen his type before. But I was surprised by the fact I’d missed most of the war. I’d been hiking around the forests and mountains looking for Gabriel for longer than I’d realized. I reacquainted myself with the luxuries of a bath and a bed. It wasn’t a bad life. I’d led better at times in the past, and I’d led worse. This was enough for me now.

The third night we were there, Penelope took me to a meeting of one of the spiritualist groups. She put all her photos in a couple of envelopes and changed into a black dress. She told me to call her Miss Cassandra as we drove there.

“Is that your last name?” I asked her.

“It’s the name I use with this group,” she said.

“What’s wrong with Penelope?” I said.

“It’s not exactly a name with mystery,” she said. “And you need a little mystery to get in the inner circles of these groups.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. And then I said, “So is Penelope a real name?”

“Here we are,” she said, smiling and pulling into a long driveway.

The meeting was at a mansion overlooking the city. A man in a suit ushered us in to a dining room, where men and women sat waiting for us. They’d already been at the wine and brandy in the glasses in front of them, judging by the flushes to their cheeks. They wore formal wear like they’d been born into it, instead of being forced to endure it only every now and then. Poor souls.

The man at the end of the table, who actually wore a monocle, stood and came around to kiss Penelope on both cheeks.

“My dear, it is so lovely to have you back from your expedition,” he said. “I trust it was fruitful?” He gave me a look that I couldn’t read but that said something.

“It was,” she said. “I even found myself an assistant.” And she introduced me to everyone around the table. She used the name I’d given her, for whatever that was worth. I won’t tell you their names. Not out of respect for their privacy, but because I don’t remember them. Hey, I’ve met a lot of people.

The monocle man seated us beside him at the table. He had to pull in a chair from the wall for me. I guess he wasn’t expecting Penelope to have any friends. I noted he kept his hand on Penelope’s arm a moment longer than was proper. I was surprised to notice it bothered me as much as it did, so I quietly did a number on the brandy in his glass, turning it into a cheap vintage.

“Miss Cassandra, do tell us of your latest adventures,” he said once he’d settled back into his own seat.

Everyone quieted and looked at Penelope, and she cleared her throat and took a sip of wine from the glass in front of her and then told them how we’d met.

Only it was all made up.

She told them how she’d seen a ghost moving through the woods outside her shack one night. She’d chased it through the forest, and it had led her to a midnight gathering of faerie in a clearing, where she’d found me, tied to a large stone. They’d been about to sacrifice me to some pagan god or another, but she’d driven them off by reading aloud some parts of the bible. She’d been too busy trying to save me to get photographs, but she had come back the next day to capture the scene. And then she pulled out the photos she’d taken that day on the hilltop of the stones or bones or whatever they had been.

The women at the table put their hands to their mouths, while the men leaned forward and stared at the photos before emptying their glasses of brandy. I was gratified to see the monocle man gag on his drink.

“You are so lucky to be alive,” one of the women said to me.

“Miss Cassandra saved your soul,” another said.

“I was lost and now I’m found,” I said, mainly because I didn’t know what else to say.

The same man who’d answered the door brought everyone plates with small roasted birds on them. Smuggled in from Europe, the monocle man said. It seemed like an awful lot of trouble for a bird, when there were ones in the tree outside he could have caught and cooked, but I refrained from saying so. Instead, I settled for repeating the brandy trick on his new glass.

Penelope kept on telling stories the whole time we were there. She said after she’d saved me she’d discovered I had no memory of who I was or how I’d wound up in that clearing.

“The faerie cast a spell on him,” another one of the women exclaimed. Maybe she was a prophet.

“I think it’s far worse than that,” Penelope said. “I think he’s a changeling. Taken from his human parents years ago in order to sacrifice him to their dark gods that night.”

They all looked at me and I refilled my brandy from one of the bottles on the table. It
was
an excellent vintage.

“I’ve brought him back to civilization in the hopes of finding his human family,” Penelope went on. “And of saving his soul.”

They all stared at me, so I raised my glass. “Let’s drink to that,” I said.

They were a good audience, so Penelope milked them for what they were worth. She pulled out the photo of the goblin skull in the stream and told them how it would call out in the voice of a lost child, trying to draw people to the water, where they would drown. She pulled out the photo of the grave where she’d found me and said it was home to a family of ghouls. She said she hadn’t been able to capture any of them on film but she had photographed their footprints. And then she pulled out photos of footprints in mud that could have come from any beast.

“Did you encounter any vampires?” asked the woman who was convinced the faerie had cast a spell on me.

“If she had, she would not be here to tell us her tales,” the monocle man said.

“Oh, but I’ve heard that they are just dreadfully misunderstood,” the woman said, and the other women around the table nodded their agreement.

I’d had enough to drink now that I wasn’t as quiet and cautious as I should have been. “Oh, they’re misunderstood all right,” I said. “Most people think that they just sip a little blood from you on some enchanted evening and then go about their merry way. If any of them got in here, it wouldn’t be little birds they’d be eating, I promise you that.”

Everyone looked at me now. Penelope gently ground her heel into my foot.

“Or so I’ve heard,” I added.

Penelope went back to making up stories about her encounters with strange and mythical beasts, and I went back to drinking brandy and keeping my mouth shut. I won’t bore you with the details. Rest assured there were more photos and more exotic dishes and more excitement and lingering of hands where there shouldn’t have been lingering of hands.

We only stayed a few hours, and then Penelope said we had to be going. She said she had a lead to track down regarding my identity. She put all the photos back in the envelopes before handing them to the monocle man. He gave her an envelope in return when he saw us to the door.

“My dear, it always a delight to see you,” he told her. “Hopefully there won’t be such a long delay next time.”

“I’ll do my best to return soon,” she said. “But you know I can’t predict where the mysteries of the world will lead.”

“Indeed,” he said and turned to me. “And I wish you well finding your people,” he said, in a way that indicated he hoped I’d never mingle with his people again.

I thought about tearing out his throat but settled for shaking his hand. I made it as painful a grip as I could without breaking anything, and I was happy to see him wince and quickly pull his hand away. Then I turned his monocle into plain glass. We left him at his front door, blinking in confusion, and drove back to the hotel.

I looked in the envelope he’d given her. It was full of money.

“Why didn’t you just tell them the truth?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t understand,” she said. “They’re not like us. They wouldn’t believe the truth. I give them the fantasies that I know they want.”

“Us?” I said.

“So where are we going to look for the angels?” she said, changing the subject in her usual subtle way.

“There aren’t any here,” I said. “I can’t feel them.” Which was probably true enough, although I hadn’t been looking that hard on account of enjoying the baths and the clean sheets and all that.

“Where do we go then?” she asked.

I didn’t have to think that over too long.

“Paris,” I said.

“Why Paris?” she asked.

“There are always angels in Paris,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have thought angels the romantic type,” she said.

“They’re not,” I said. “They like all the catacombs and cemeteries there. I think it makes them feel at home.”

“It’s just been liberated from the Nazis,” she pointed out. “There’s probably still fighting going on.”

“Even better,” I said. “The angels like blood.”

She sold the car to the front-desk clerk at the hotel at a bargain price and we took the train across the country to New York. We threw decorum to the wind and rented a sleeper cabin. We’d shared the same shack in the woods, after all. For once in my many lives I managed to be a gentleman and didn’t touch her. I could barely sleep though. I was too busy wondering why I’d been so overcome with jealousy back at that mansion. Also, I kept thinking about her naked body underneath the pyjamas as she lay beside me, covered by the sheets. I was a man, after all, and not Christ.

We passed through long forests as dark as night and wound our way along the bottoms of mountains where men must have died by the dozens to lay the tracks for the train. We crossed empty, dead farmers’ fields, where the houses and broken farm equipment lay half-buried after countless dust storms. Penelope took photos of them with her portable camera. We passed other fields where men and women bent with age were tending rows of wheat shoots just barely out of the ground. Penelope took photos of them too.

“I thought you only took photos of supernatural things,” I said.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said.

“Like what you meant when you said Miss Cassandra’s friends back in San Francisco weren’t like us,” I said. “What do you mean, us?”

She smiled and took a photo of me with the camera. She didn’t say anything, so I didn’t speak again either. I wanted some answers before we actually got close to any angels. I needed to know what I was dealing with when it came to Penelope.

The train slowed as we passed a camp of homeless people living by the tracks. They huddled by their fires and watched us. People from the train leaned out the windows and tossed them chocolate bars, packages of cigarettes and matches, even a few cans of food.

The homeless people left their fires and tents to gather up the things on the ground and lifted their hands in thanks. A few of them bowed their heads in silent prayer, and I turned away from them.

We sped up again and continued on, through more empty fields and then villages and towns. After a time, the night sky began to glow in the distance. New York. When we disembarked from the train and walked out into the city, the moon was red.

We found a hotel and rented two rooms again. I lay in my bed and thought about Penelope on the other side of the wall between us. I wondered if she was lying awake thinking about me.

The next day we flew to Paris. I paid for the flights with money I’d lifted here and there from people on the train. Penelope had never been to the city before—she’d never even been to Europe—so I spent the morning showing her around the sights. Some of them were marked with bullet holes now, and others had been blown up, either by the Nazis or the resistance, but most of the ones that counted were still there. And there was something in the air, something special even for Paris. A sense of freedom and exhilaration. The sort of feeling you always find in cities after a siege has been lifted. I couldn’t help but point out all the sights to her because of that. We stopped in patisseries and ate croissants and sweets. The last time I’d been in Paris, I’d been drunk on absinthe and on the run from . . . well, I couldn’t remember who I’d been running from that time. I preferred this way of travelling.

In the afternoon, we wandered the River Seine. We stopped on a bridge and watched boats drift underneath, all of them bearing multiple French flags. I remember my breath was visible in the air. I remember my skin was cold but I was warm inside. A few lines of Baudelaire came to me.

“Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,” I said, “and all of summer’s stunning afternoons will be gone.”

“It was summer yesterday,” Penelope said, looking up at the grey sky overhead. “Now it’s autumn.”