Burn, Beautiful Soul

by William J. Donahue

  She has no response.

  “In all seriousness, I wish you would just leave me alone,” it says. “Every other human has.”

  “And therein lies the problem. Too many people in this miserable pit of a town have turned a blind eye to you. Believe me, I wish I could go on living my life like an ostrich bird with its head in the sand, pretending you don’t exist. But I see you, demon. I see you clear as day.”

  “You seem to think the two of us are engaged in some sort of battle to the death. I’ll put my hand on any book you want and swear that you don’t factor into my thoughts—except maybe twice a day, when I see the trouble you’re stirring up outside my place of employment. I’ll wonder: What kind of craziness does Edna have in store for me today? All I want is peace. If I sought something else, you’d know by now. If I really wanted to, I could make it so no one ever sees you again.”

  She bristles.

  “I beg you,” it continues. “Just leave me to my business, and I’ll gladly leave you to yours.”

  “That’s exactly what you want the world to think. But I know better. Every word out of your mouth is a bald lie.”

  “Would you like to know what I really want, Edna?”

  She grips her blouse and holds it tight to her chest.

  “I know exactly what you want, beast! It’s written plain as anything in the Good Book. John, chapter ten, I think: ‘to steal and kill and destroy’.”

  The demon wags its horned head.

  “I’ve seen too much death and destruction in my days,” it says. “Conflict and chaos have no place in my itinerary. No, I’m here to learn and to absorb all things beautiful. And Edna, I want you to hear what I’m about to say: I’m not leaving this place until I’ve had my fill, and nothing or no one will stand in my way. Least of all you.”

  “Just go on thinking that,” she says calmly.

  She eyes the tables around her, imagining someone somewhere will see her speaking with the enemy and misinterpret her intentions. Even the smallest misstep could break her tenuous hold on the mantle of power in the church she fought so hard to win.

  “Go crawl back into whatever slime-slathered hole spat you out,” she says, waving the demon away. “I’ll see you soon enough.”

  “Unless I see you first.”

  The demon rises from its chair, collects its books and clops off. Heavy hoof steps crack against the marble-hard floor. It stops for a moment, as if wanting to say something further, but keeps on going. Its horns disappear around the edge of a pea-colored bookcase, but the clacking of hooves echoes. Her gut voices its displeasure with another urgent gurgle. She gets up and heads not to the restroom but to the checkout desk, flagging down the first attendant she sees: a redheaded woman, maybe mid-thirties, thick in the hips, large breasted. Edna wrinkles her nose.

  “Why is he here?” Edna hisses. “It! Why is it here?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the redhead whispers. “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t, deary. The demon. Why is the demon here? You know, the big, tall, devil-looking brute that’s been stinking up the aisles with his brimstone B.O.? The Antichrist?”

  She slams her books onto the counter in front of the redhead.

  “It’s a public library, Miss Bab—”

  “Free for people! For humans! Not him! He belongs at the bottom of a ditch!”

  Edna pushes her stack of books off the edge of the counter. The falling books topple five columns of Dewey Decimal cards that had been stacked neatly on the desktop. The cards scatter like thrown confetti—under the copy machine, beneath the redhead’s slippers, into the office of the library manager—as Edna marches off to find a suitable restroom so she can move her nervous bowels.

  Chapter 17

  One Lock, Many Keys

  Herbert slams the car door.

  He moves to the rear of the vehicle, fretting over the discolored paint of the trunk and roof. The trunk yawns open, exposing the assorted pieces of the all-gray Hooke cooker. Reassembling the contraption takes some doing. Sweat drips from the tip of his nose.

  Nothing ever goes as planned, he thinks. Not today, not this week, not this life.

  The cooker must weigh fifty pounds if it weighs an ounce. He struggles as he hurries up the path toward Basil’s door. The squat L-shaped building wears a coat of paint he might describe as mustard brown—drab, carelessly chosen, sad. Orange shutters frame each picture window. He stumbles on a patch of broken concrete, and the egg-shaped cooker slips from his hands. Metal clangs against pavement. A rectangular panel tumbles onto the grass and he’s forced to retrieve. He clenches his fists and holds them to his forehead.

  Only then does he realize he does not know which apartment is Basil’s. He curses under his breath.

  He sees Basil’s accursed Harley in a spot by the curb and decides to knock on the door directly in front of the motorcycle. After his knuckles rap on the paint-flecked wood, he waits ten seconds, then twenty. No response. A dying rosebush withers in the dirt patch to his right, nothing but twigs, thorns and shriveled leaves. An orange shutter dangles by one hinge, and spiders have spun their feathery webs in the space between the shutter and the window frame. He knocks a second time and the door creaks open.

  “What?” the hardened voice demands.

  “Excuse me. I’m looking for Basil.”

  “The demon?”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  The door slams. Displaced air caresses Herbert’s cheeks.

  He knocks on four more doors, earning a similar response from each surly tenant.

  “Just one more,” he whispers. “Bulcavage can go to Hell if he thinks I’m wasting another minute chasing down this goat-footed dildo.”

  At the next door, number thirteen—the first digit is gone entirely, and one of the nails that should be holding the three in place has gone missing, so the digit hangs on its side, looking like a lower-case W in cursive—he puts the dented cooker down and raps gently, almost too gently. He turns his body so he faces the parking lot. He can see his car.

  The door opens so swiftly he can feel the air being pulled past him.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for Basil.”

  “Yeah?”

  The smell of whiskey seeps through the pores of the screen.

  “I’m guessing I’ve got the wrong place. Sorry for—”

  “What’s a guy like you want with a piece of work like Basil? If you’re looking for trouble …”

  Herbert takes a step backward. He knows by now that it’s better to run than to stay and fight.

  “Shut up and let him in, Chester.”

  It’s Basil’s familiar baritone, far off.

  “Ah, I’m just fucking with you,” the man at the door tells Herbert. “Come on in, buddy.”

  Herbert genuflects to collect the cooker. As he takes a reluctant step across the threshold, he sees Basil reposing on the couch, beer in hand. The demon climbs off the couch to make the requisite introductions.

  “Chester’s an English professor who got canned because he’s a drunk who likes to screw around with undergrads,” Basil says.

  “He’s a lying son of a bitch,” Chester says. “Don’t listen to a word out of his mouth. I’m on sabbatical, voluntarily.”

  As the door closes behind him, Herbert thinks he will call in sick tomorrow to make up for the perfectly good afternoon he is about to sacrifice.

  * * *

  The smell of charred flesh fills the living room, wafting in from the patio. Herbert watches through the screen as Basil stands on the concrete slab. The sun highlights the veins bulging from each of the demon’s absurd muscles—bowling balls for arms, calves as sculpted as carved granite. Dutifully manning the cooker, Basil nudges the rack of ribs with his right finger. He then slips the finger into his mouth and deems the ribs almost done.

  “Another hour, maybe,” he says. “I offer a blessing for this beast. Its life h
as ended so ours may endure. Tomorrow could be our turn, the fates dictating our flesh becomes sustenance for the bellies of our betters.”

  “Speak for yourself,” says Chester. He punctuates the sentence with a resonant belch.

  “Can we speed things up?” Herbert asks. He sucks the last slosh of foam from a Miller Lite bottle.

  “All things take time to achieve greatness,” Basil says. “Chewing on raw meat means nothing, but to prepare it, to care for it, to make it tender—this is where the art comes in.”

  “I’m ready for the art to fill my belly now,” Chester replies.

  “Food is more than load for the gut,” Basil replies. “It’s a celebration, an offering of peace, or a seed of sacrifice on the eve of war.”

  Basil goes on to explain how demons celebrate in Our Fiery Home. He describes a septet of brainless troglodytes cranking massive spits, each wooden spike bearing the gift of a gargantuan beast abducted from the surface—the head of a tusked elephant, the armored carapace of a rhinoceros, the charred spindles of a giraffe.

  The account is so vivid, Herbert can practically hear the pockets of mammalian fat bursting and hissing in the open fire.

  “You smell that?” Basil asks. “Flesh over flame is a joy, but flesh over flame seasoned with the right blend of spices? Cumin, paprika, granulated onion, maybe a little cayenne—you’ll never have anything better.”

  “I don’t want to know how you know this stuff,” Chester says.

  “Books. I spend my Saturdays at the library, leafing through piles of cookbooks, memoirs, novels. Oh, and rather than sleep, I watch TV. A lot of it.”

  “So does everyone else,” Herbert says. “It’s the national pastime.”

  “Sure. Only I pay attention.”

  “I don’t sleep either,” Chester says as he raises a half-empty rocks glass. “I pass out.”

  “Because of your excessive alcohol consumption,” Basil says.

  “Yes, Basil, that is the joke.”

  Herbert ignores the exchange and turns to Basil. “Why don’t you sleep?”

  “There’s just too much to do,” he responds. “My time here is short. Plus, I’m not fond of the things I see when I close my eyes.”

  “Nightmares?”

  “Not exactly. My dreams are mostly unpleasant, but … well, they also cause me considerable pain.”

  “How so?” Chester asks.

  “Each night I dream a different chapter of the same story: the same characters, the same places, just different parts of the same, drawn-out fairy tale. Sort of like I’m being forced to relive an experience I suffered through but can’t quite remember. It’s plagued me my whole life, as far as I know.”

  “Sounds like a punishment to me,” Chester slurs.

  Herbert asks, “What happens in these dreams?”

  “It’s a simple story. When I sleep, I see the world through the eyes of a man—a human man. His name is Emmitt Wells. He’s English, though he lives in a London unlike today, a London from long ago. There’s a woman, and even if she’s not in a particular episode of the dream, she always has a presence. The whole dream revolves around her. Don’t ask me her name. Don’t ask me what she looks like, because I can’t quite make out the details of her face—always a smudge, nothing more than a smudge. But I can hear her voice. I can see the silhouette of her body, smell her, feel the warmth of her body against mine.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Chester says. Another belch.

  “Things happen, as they often do, and the story never ends well,” Basil says. “Every time I part ways with her, I do so with the knowledge that she will suffer, and I know I have played a part in her suffering. The worst part of it all: I know there’s nothing I can do to prevent any of it. I fail. I try to help, but I fail. In the end, everything goes dark and cold, and then the story starts all over again from the beginning.”

  “You must have fucked up something royal,” Chester says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Yeah, you fucked up right well and good in a past life. That’s why you look the way you do now. Blame the Dungeon Master, the String Puller, the Maker and Undoer of All Things.”

  “That’s assuming he believes in reincarnation,” Herbert says. “It doesn’t matter what he believes,” Chester says. “The only thing that matters is whether or not it’s true.”

  “I don’t follow,” Basil says.

  “If literature teaches us anything, it’s that the necks of those who stray from the straight and narrow path are doomed to bear a heavy yoke. There’s a reckoning at some point. In other words, there’s no such thing as a free sin. Look at Adam and Eve. Look at Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Look at the works of Tolstoy. Christ, look at every big-titted bimbo who ever felt the cold steel of the madman’s blade in any campy slasher flick from the past twenty years. You’re Prometheus. You’re Sisyphus. Only instead of having your liver pecked out by scavengers or being forced to shoulder a half-ton boulder up a mountain for all eternity, your punishment comes to you in the form of those rotten dreams you’re forced to relive over and over and over again. To be cast out of Eden and be forced to relive your mistakes every time you close your eyes? That’s a particularly creative brand of cruelty.”

  “Unless,” Herbert interjects, “all demons’ brains are hardwired that way—like, maybe you all share the same dream.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Basil says. “One demon does not speak to another about the frailties of his unconscious mind.”

  “Like I said, you fucked up,” Chester says, “and because of your fucked-up-ness you died and came back, reborn in the fires of Hell and cursed for the rest of your days. At least, that’s the kind of nonsense someone with a King James Bible on his nightstand might have you believe.”

  “Our Fiery Home,” Basil says.

  “Say what?” says Chester.

  “It’s not Hell. It’s Our Fiery Home.”

  “Whatever. You’re a case study in rebirth and retribution.”

  The room goes quiet. They sit there and sip, Basil and Herbert from their brown bottles, Chester from his crystal glass. The ribs continue their transformation on the slats of the cooker.

  “I don’t know what Bulcavage wants from us,” Herbert says finally.

  “You mean the Hooke campaign?” Basil says. “Simple. He wants us to find an artful way to sell an artless hunk of metal.”

  “No poems this time. No ‘Transcending Death’ soliloquies.”

  “Of course not. There’s nothing to this thing—just a big metal box.”

  “More like a cylinder.”

  “It’s not about the thing,” Basil says as he raps the cooker’s metal shell. “We’re selling the story.”

  “Which is?”

  “The best things in life take time.”

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know. Making a fine wine or a good cheese. Baking a soufflé. Or human germination—the product of nine months in the womb after sperm meets ovum.”

  “Naturally.”

  “We’re selling indulgence. We’re selling hedonism—that’s what this is all about.”

  Herbert tosses an empty bottle into the trashcan and grabs another from the fridge, the shelves barren save a few bottles of Miller Lite, a jar of honey mustard and an open package of butcher paper bearing something pink and bloody.

  “Where did you get the ribs?” Herbert asks. “I can’t imagine you standing at the butcher counter, waving your paper ticket and saying, ‘Ooh, ooh. I’m next!’”

  “From Anton, just like Bulcavage said. I asked and he delivered. ‘Nothing but best for you,’”Basil says in his best Russian accent. “What’s Anton’s story?”

  “You’ll have to ask Bulcavage.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “The less you know about Anton—and about Bulcavage, for that matter—the better off you’ll be. Even I don’t ask too many questions.”

  Basil holds up his hands, palms facing up. He wants more.

&nbs
p; “From what I gather, Anton is Bulcavage’s brother-in-law,” Herbert says. “Bulcavage married Anton’s sister.”

  “Where is she?” Basil asks. “I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of her. In fact, I haven’t heard a word about her until now. I had assumed Bulcavage was a serial bachelor.”

  “Nobody knows, really. Just rumors. Most people say he’s a bad man, our boss.”

  “How so?”

  “The agency—just pocket change, something to legitimize him. He’s got his hands in everything. Drugs, most likely, and … well, I don’t want to call it human trafficking, but I don’t know what else to call it. He owns this place, too, this whole apartment complex. Just look at the degenerates who live here. He must rent rooms by the hour.”

  A few seconds pass before Herbert realizes his gaffe.

  “When I say degenerates, I mean present company excluded, of course,” he adds, much too late.

  All three share a laugh.

  Herbert hoists the bottle to his lips and takes a long swig. He checks his watch and doesn’t care that it’s nearly five o’clock.

  * * *

  A spread-eagled Chester snores on the chaise lounge. A dangling hand flicks his toppled rocks glass, sending it rolling in a half circle across the concrete slab.

  “Five bucks says he pisses himself,” Basil says.

  “Is that a common occurrence?” Herbert replies.

  “More common than you might think.”

  “He’s a colorful character.”

  “Chester? He’s brilliant. He’s an alcoholic and a lothario, but he’s brilliant. And he’s a real mess. If you’re around him long enough, he’s liable to puke in your lap or try to slice your jugular in a drunken fit. He means well. You won’t find a better neighbor.”

  “You said he’s a college professor?”

  “Technically. I don’t know the whole story, but he’s got tenure over at the university in Lincoln. He’s on sabbatical for doing something stupid. I’m sure there was alcohol involved, and undergrads in less clothing than they should be around a college professor more than twice their age. He screwed some big-shot alum’s daughter, probably.”