Demon Dance

by Brian Freyermuth

  “The point, Mr. St. James, is that you know there are things a man like me can't discuss.”

  “Secrets worth hiding,” I mused. “I know a few of those. I also know there are things that should see the light of day.”

  “Yes, of course,” The smile slipped a bit. “But this isn’t one of them. As for your protagonist, I would have him always meet his issues head on and never run from them. Now did I give you enough information for your book?”

  I could read a dismissal coming. “More than enough, Senator. I hope I didn’t take too much of your time.”

  “Not at all.” Helms stood up, and I followed suit. “Any time you need to do more research, just call up Maggie and she’ll set something up. I am a man of accessibility, as my wife always says.”

  And like that, the interview was over. I snuck one last glance at the ancient case in the corner before the senator ushered me out the door.

  The cat/frog/man figurine seemed amused by my general predicament.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Thelma handed me my coffee and asked, “So, was he a crazy killer?”

  I sat down at her counter and shook my head. “The bad guys usually don’t have a neon sign above their heads proclaiming themselves to be the king of baby kickers.”

  “Yes, but I’ve seen interviews with Ted Bundy and the Iceman. One look in their eyes and you can tell they’ve gone bad.”

  I learned a while ago that Thelma loved those serial killer documentaries. Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, Gacy, you name it, she knew about it. “This wasn’t like that, but he was hiding something. He’s also extremely ambitious. Rumors say that he’s looking to be the next president. You can’t be all puppies and roses to pull that off.”

  “But enough to send demons after a six-year-old girl?”

  I shrugged. After the interview this morning I had figured that I needed someone to talk to. For a brief moment Cate came to mind, but, well…we all know where that went. So I called Jake, but he either wasn’t around his phone or he ignored my call. Knowing my luck, it was probably the latter. So I drove back home and then walked down to Thelma’s.

  “So the mother doesn’t know who sent the demon?” she asked.

  “Nope, just Helms, but she’s convinced he didn’t do it. In fact, the way she defended him was odd. Most people assume all politicians eat their young and screw anything in a skirt. I know I do.”

  “That’s because you’re the eternal optimist,” Thelma said with a wry smile. She walked around the counter as I talked.

  “What’s the difference between a politician and roadkill?” I asked. She shook her head as she sat down next to me. “The roadkill has skid marks in front of it.”

  Thelma laughed as she leaned her elbows on the counter. Brown slacks and a black shirt made up her dress code for today, which came across a lot cleaner and more professional looking than me. She smelled like jasmine. I brought my thoughts back and caught her mid-sentence.

  “…you do next?”

  I shook my head to clear it. My brain gathered up all the pieces of her sentence and I replied, “I’ll probably hit the library. I need to check through the papers for any recent disappearances. No-Eyes can’t be summoned by goat’s blood—you would need a big sacrifice.”

  “Human?”

  “Yes indeed. Each time.”

  “God.”

  “He has nothing to do with it. Welcome to free will.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Demons can’t interfere unless they’re summoned by human hands. Then neither Heaven nor Hell can do anything about it. Free will.”

  “That’s still awful. You would think Heaven would do something about it.”

  I smirked. “One would think.” My thoughts went back to the visit from Michael and I shuddered. “But they have their rules.”

  “What about the Watchers?”

  “What about them?”

  “Couldn’t they do something about this?”

  I paused and stirred my coffee. “I’ve been thinking about that. Remember how I told you that they were like the supernatural Men in Black? They never interfere if it’s a small incident, but they play judge and executioner if it gets out of control.”

  “Executioner?”

  “Sorcerers have to be clever to get past the Watchers. If one gets careless and his demon goes on a rampage, he tends to disappear in the middle of the night. No one ever finds him again.”

  “So if you have a big enough mess, the Watchers give out their own brand of justice,” she said, and I nodded. She then looked around her broken and boarded-up shop. “So this doesn’t constitute ‘big enough’ in their eyes?”

  “That’s why I’m confused,” I said. “Usually if a demon attacks in public like this, the cops find pieces of the sorcerer from here to New York City. Problem solved. But this guy keeps sending No-Eyes out. First me and then Beth and her daughter. And the Watchers have done nothing but clean up afterwards.”

  “They’re afraid.”

  “Either that, or someone paid them off. Personally, I hope it’s the latter, because anything that can scare the Watchers makes me want to move to Australia.”

  “Hey,” she said as she nudged her shoulder into mine, “you’re still alive. You’ll get this guy, whoever he is.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I wish I shared it.” I paused and turned to her. “I am sorry about not calling yesterday and giving an update. My wife always got frustrated with that.”

  “That’s OK; Jake filled me in after he went to your rescue.” She then frowned. “And I thought you said the woman who died was a friend?”

  “Cate was a friend, but also my sister-in-law. My wife, Ann, died almost five years ago.”

  Thelma covered my hand with hers. “I’m sorry.” Her flesh was warm against mine. “Was it a demon?” she asked.

  I gave her a soft smile. “No, and that’s the ironic part.” I stared at one of the masks hanging from the wall. The trickster god Anansi didn’t offer any advice with his smile and winking eye. “We had just gotten off a big job in Boston. Really nasty stuff. Usually I didn’t involve Ann in my cases, but she dove into it anyway. She saved my life that day.”

  I closed my eyes as the attic door of my memories cracked open. “The incident put a wedge between us when we got back home. One rainy night we were driving home from one of those theaters that show old movies for real cheap. We watched The Princess Bride. It was her favorite.

  “All I remember was her laughing at one of my jokes. I can still hear it. Then the world imploded.” I opened my eyes.

  “I woke up five, ten minutes later, still attached to my seat belt. The world was jumbled, light and rain all mixed together. A drunk driver had hit us from the side…Ann’s side.”

  “My God,” Thelma whispered.

  I smirked at that one. “Ann used to say that life is a constant battle between faith and chance. That by giving us free will, the creator also gave us chance. Chance is what takes the husband away with a sudden heart attack. Chance is what stops a baby’s breathing for no reason. And chance is what took her that night. It’s our faith that gets us through it.” I patted Thelma’s hand and wiped my eyes across my sleeve.

  “And did it?” she asked.

  “Did what?”

  “Did your faith get you through it?”

  My smile disappeared as I stood up. “I’ve seen things you couldn’t imagine. Ghosts, legends come to life, demons, and angels. But I don’t have faith in any of it. Life is all chance, and it’s just our job to muddle through it.”

  She stood with me, leaned forward, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Once again the smell of jasmine washed over me, but this time the Pain drowned it all out.

  “And yet you still fight,” she whispered with a smile. “That’s courage.”

  “Or maybe my head’s too thick,” I told her. “Life might be a roulette wheel, but we can at least rig the ball.”

  “Go on,” she said with
a laugh. “Go find who did this before anyone else gets hurt.”

  “Will do,” I said as I tipped my baseball cap (New Orleans Saints this time) at her. The kiss lingered on my cheek as I turned and walked into the cold Seattle afternoon.

  Once outside I huddled down in my jacket and headed toward my next goal. I walked up the street in the drizzle and wondered if it was time to invest in a trench coat. Maybe one of those black dusters. Wild Bill with a pair of holy knuckles and a dragon scale strapped to my hip.

  My goal wasn’t far from Thelma’s shop. Tucked away between a used record store and a pizzeria, the Fremont Library resembled a neighborhood coffee shop or antique store more than a government institution. Most walked right past it without giving it another thought, which always seemed odd to me. You would think, in the digital age, that the library would put big neon signs out front proclaiming “actual books here! Please come in!” Instead it hid from view, like a young boy running from a pack of bullies.

  By the time I reached the library, most of my injuries from the last twenty-four hours had woken up and started clattering their tin cups against the bars in my head. I waited outside the library’s double glass doors for the riot in my muscles to settle down. Most people were wise enough to stay in when the rains came, so Fremont Ave was relatively deserted. A college student next door examined a vinyl copy of “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. Appropriate, if you ask me.

  Dark thoughts clouded my mind as I stood there and waited for the tremors to cease. The shadows around me hid unknown attackers. The down side to research was it gave you too much time to worry. Give me a demon to fight and I'm fine. Give me newspapers to attack and I begin to doubt.

  No use in that now. I shook the rain out of my head and opened the doors to the inner sanctum. The inside of the library was pure function. Brown carpet lined the concrete floor, the fiber so thin one could floss with it, while gray metal book shelves filled the room like wary soldiers. Yes, the room looked like the second cousin of a German battleship, but the warmth of the books and the employees made up for the utilitarian decor.

  I took in the smell of paper and ink. Murmurs of conversation overlaid the hum of the heater as a few customers went from shelf to shelf or whispered around the metal tables.

  The resident librarian was an elderly woman who looked like she was barely entering her sixties. With long limbs and a thin frame, she reminded me of an elderly willow with long white hair that flowed like silken branches. She topped me by about three inches and looked like she weighed eighty pounds soaking wet. Of course, I knew she was a hell of a lot older than she looked, and she could snap me like a pretzel if provoked.

  “Hey, Fay,” I said as I walked up to her. Fay sat in a rickety wooden chair behind the main desk, the heels of her blue cowboy boots propped on a pink stool that had “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” etched into the rim. A pair of thin spectacles perched on her nose, and she was about halfway through a copy of Paradise Lost.

  The damp from the drizzle outside still clung to my clothes, and I made sure not to get any water on the cascade of books in front of her. Remember what I said about provoked? Yeah, that would do it.

  “Let me see,” she said as she made a twirling motion with her hand. Her voice was one of the few things completely unexpected from a thin frame like her. All rich tones and silk, like a movie starlet.

  I turned and showed her my New Orleans Saints cap.

  “That’s a new one,” she told me. “I can’t stand baseball myself.”

  “Football.”

  “Whatever. Are you here for more research?”

  “Research and a visit with my favorite librarian. How’s life been treating you lately?”

  “Good as always,” she said and smiled. That was always her response. I figured the end days could crash down on her house and she’d say life was “good as always.”

  “How’s Otis?”

  She shrugged. “You know how he is in the winter. Starts bitching about moving south, but he’ll never leave. The cold is in his bones.”

  “If he wants cold, he should’ve moved back east. There’s a lot more snow out there.”

  Fay’s gray eyes flashed. “He might be bred for the cold, but I’m not. If I see another snowflake I’ll bring down judgment day myself.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “Well, tell him hi for me.”

  “Oh yes, he would love that,” she said, the sarcasm dripping on the floor.

  I raised my hands. “You know, I’m getting tired of people feeling that way. It wasn’t my fault he lost all that cash.”

  “But you told him which team to bet on.”

  “It’s his fault for asking me in the first place. I’m a writer, not an oracle. He should’ve asked one of those birds of his. Or you.”

  She smiled.

  “Anyway, I need newspaper clippings,” I told her. “You have all the Seattle Times?”

  She nodded her head toward a doorway to the left of the main door. “Back there, second door on the right. It’s a tiny room, but you’ll find what you want there. Not many people go back there anymore, not with the Internet crowding out all the paper media. It’ll put me out of a job one day, mark my words.”

  “Ah, print will never die,” I told her. “You’ll see to that.”

  Fay made a harrumph sound and held up a key. “You’ll need this.”

  “Thanks,” I said as I grabbed it.

  “You know,” she said as she gazed at me over her glasses, “we did get an order of Lilith Taylor yesterday. We have most of her books on the shelf now, if you want to check them out.”

  “I like romance as much as the next guy,” I winked at her, “but I can’t stand her. She’s a hack.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Fay said. “I’ve read all her books. She knows her stuff.”

  “Then you can tell me how it ends.”

  She chuckled as I walked through the doorway. It led to a short hall painted brown: chocolate wood floor, shiny brown walls, and a wood ceiling. Definitely old school. The first door I passed led to the bathroom that looked smaller than the cab of my truck. The second door opened to a microfilm viewer, a stool that looked like it came from King Henry VIII’s personal bedroom, and a gun-metal cabinet, all crammed together like stowaways hiding in the boiler room of a submarine.

  Dozens of film canisters lined the inside of the cabinet when I unlocked it, and with a sigh at the true monotony of sleuthing work, I grabbed the last year’s worth of newspapers and sat down at the small monitor to begin my search. First I checked the recent editions, going back a few days. I wanted to find any strange disappearances that would explain the machine-gun summoning two days ago. Of course there was nothing.

  An article from yesterday piqued my interest, but it didn’t give me any new insights. The picture showed Senator Helms standing with his daughter on a podium in front of a huge crowd of adoring fans. Sorry, I mean voters. Helms waved at the crowd while his daughter stood on the other side of the stage. The distance between them conveyed a tale I couldn’t interpret yet.

  The search continued.

  Let me paint a picture. Pick up a single grain of white rice and drop it on a hard wooden floor. Easy to find, right? OK, now take that same grain of rice and make a tiny little mark in black ink. Drop it into the original bag of rice, shake it up good and proper, and then dump the entire bag onto the same floor. That only gives you a taste of the hell that was in store for me over the next two hours.

  Check the page, move the film, check the headlines, move the film…and I was only checking the Sunday papers. After reading through a year’s worth, my eyeballs wanted to start a Cuban revolution in their sockets. Viva la eyestrain.

  I was about to head to the roof to practice my skeet shooting with the machine when I came across a diamond buried between a woman having triplets and a dog that had saved a family from a burning home. A local community college girl named Dorothy Rays had disappeared the night
before her midterms, leaving family and police baffled. Now, usually I can’t count the number of missing people in a given year, but this caught my eye. First off, there didn’t seem to be any leads, and second, the placement of the article stumped me.

  How was the disappearance of a middle-class college girl pushed into the back of the paper? This was the kind of story most papers wanted on their front page, screaming “Read me! Read me!” at the top of their lungs.

  The next day’s headlines showed nothing and the same on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday a follow-up on page three. The police declared Dorothy a runaway. The girl had recently taken an extra job in the red light district, and she owed money to a group of shady businessmen, thus the whole skipping town thing. No reasons why she took the job and no real follow-ups after that. It was a black-out job, plain and simple.

  If this thing went so deep that a college girl could get lost in it, the newspapers were pretty useless. I wrote the girl’s name down on a scrap of paper and tucked it away. The newspaper wasn’t my only source of information. It was time to give my favorite hacker a try.

  “So I guess you can add psychic to your resume of assorted super powers,” Jessie said as she answered my call. “I was just about to call you.”

  “Call me the king of good timing,” I said as I leaned back in the chair. “Please tell me you know who owned the penthouse that got nuked.”

  “A name and an address, all rolled up with a pretty pink bow. One forty-five Winchester Street, Mercer Island.”

  “Mercer Island?” I whistled. “Another power broker?”

  “Something like that. His name is Henry Divita and he’s some big-time stockbroker. Takes the family on weekend trips, been married for thirty years. No disputes, no police records, nothing. He doesn’t sound like the Freddy Krueger type.”

  “They never do,” I smirked. “Do you have his schedule on hand?”

  “You mean the kind that would leave his house open to those with virtuous motives but less than lawful means? You’re in luck. Tonight the good shark is out with his family to see The Music Man in lovely downtown Seattle. They’ll be gone until late.”