Demon

by Tosca Lee

  With demon-induced vision I felt, more than saw, a singular form, his span gigantic over the din. He did not blot out the light as he should have but against all logic seemed to intensify it. And now I realized that the giant form radiated its own brilliance down onto the horde like mirrors reflecting the sun.

  Lo, the light of Lucifer!

  I was elated, high on a rush different from any recreational substance I had ever dabbled in at college. No designer drug, no hit of pure cocaine could begin to compete with it.

  And then the hand clasping mine let go. I snapped like a retracting cord—back to the table, to myself—with a jolt that made me gasp. I sucked air into my lungs like a swimmer surfacing from near-fatal depths. The electric lights in the tea shop seemed as severe as surgical lights in an operating room, and I felt pinned by an abnormal gravity to the hard chair beneath me, my limbs as stiff as they would have been after days in traction. I felt the inexplicable urge to weep; I was too aware of my human shell, the conflated emotions—human and otherworldly—roiling in my gut.

  Across from me, Lucian dredged the tea ball through his cup.

  “What—what was that?” I demanded when I knew I wouldn’t vomit on the table.

  “A memory. History. What once was,” he said, waving his hand.

  In the frame of my pathetic human shell, I could still feel the elation, see the body emanating light like spots in my eyes after a flash. I was out of sorts. Dismantled. The urge to weep became contempt. I felt toyed with. As though I had been slipped a drug without my permission—one that had taken me to a state that my human condition could never support or ever hope to reach again except through him.

  “I do apologize. I needed you to understand, to know, to feel what my kinship with him meant.”

  That’s what it was, that intoxication. I shuddered. If what he said was true, I had just vicariously experienced communion with the devil. I pushed up from the table, sturdier on my legs than I expected.

  Lucian spread his hands. “Oh, come now.”

  But I picked up my jacket and walked resolutely out the door.

  Out on the street I wondered if I was being foolish—if, like a lover ending an argument in a huff, I should turn around and go back. What if this was the end? Maybe I would be rid of him, of this entire thing.

  That thought brought me no relief. In fact, it conjured panic. If this was the end, it would close the portal to something, some greater context, containing answers to questions I had not known to ask. Worst of all, I would never know what this had to do with me—a question that had begun to eat at me. Would I wander around half-cooked after this, knowing there was something more, the access to which I had thrown away? And would I be haunted by his words—the words that cycled through my mind at night until I wrote them down simply to rid myself of them—indefinitely?

  I returned to the tea shop, unsure what I meant to do or say. But the back table was empty, one of the girls from the counter already gathering the cups, the pot of water, the discarded tea balls onto a tray.

  As I left again, his words pursued me in his absence, a specter at my back whispering visions of heaven, of the devil, in my ear.

  5

  My hands burned, seared by the throne that threatened to blind my vision and melt down my wings, but still I held on. I was strong strong and weightless, as though I had come from a place with five times the gravity of this one. And there was Lucifer, spanning the heavens above me, his light so bright now that the wings of the others were nearly translucent with it, their bodies white conflagrations so that I thought, We, too, are transformed. And I was broken by gratitude that I should feel kinship with that splendid creature. It was a new and marvelous identity that swelled my immortal chest.

  I wasn’t the only one. I clamored with equally awed seraphim and archangels, their hands grappling with mine. We had witnessed his glory. We had bent the knee. I could no sooner turn back than I could annul the oath of my allegiance. I had undone the contentment of my prior existence with words and acts irrevocable.

  We sped heavenward, drawn up after Lucifer like a magnet, inspired by a single will—Lucifer’s. The cosmos had shrunk to this: the expanse of his wings blotting out the sky, his brilliance diminishing the stars, the great power of his ascent piercing its way to heaven.

  But then something happened. The higher we flew, the closer we approached the summit of the mount of God, the more a sense of inevitability crept over me. It crawled like plague over my body, settled like ache in my bones. I told myself that I was simply in unfamiliar territory; only Lucifer himself had ascended so high, to stand in the throne room of the Almighty.

  But no, it was more than that. Something was wrong. I felt naked, even in glory.

  Now, with the corporate thrum of our wings loud in my ears, I noticed strange things: seraphim regarded me jealously. One of them even pulled at my hands to wrest them from the throne. I knew what he was doing, and I was filled with rage. That seraph would seek higher favor with Lucifer by assuming my better hold on the throne! It didn’t matter that he was my superior—this was the anarchy of ambition, and I felt no loyalty to rank order. I hated him, and though somehow certain I had never before raised a hand against anyone, I tore at his wing, ripping it.

  He clawed at me, face contorted with rage, fingers biting like talons until I let go with a howl, unable to match him. But I was insane with anger and pursued him, clinging to his feet, pulling at him, wanting him to fall. I cursed him with new and foreign words. Unholy words. And now the others around us were clamoring, too, each determined to find favor above his fellow with this new god, jealous of those closest to him, resentment plain in their eyes. Revolt, glorious to us before, had sprung full-grown and hideous from our hearts. Our fervor, our ambition, careened into violence. And the higher we ascended, the worse it became, until there wasn’t an angel without menace on his face, no seraph without pride in his better strength, no archangel without possession in his eyes.

  We had found a new order, appointed our god, and brought chaos to the world.

  The stars wouldn’t abide it. Before we could ascend beyond the second heaven, the sky flashed. I felt anger again, but it wasn’t mine. This anger was righteous, so different from that chaos permeating our knot of rebels. The Host was upon us. I recognized faces I had once loved. In the dream I knew them. And I was struck by their pure, sanctified power. They outnumbered us, and for the first time I felt the force of their strength—a strength I had once been a part of. I saw the hands of kin raised against me, and I feared for myself.

  And then I feared even more because I had never before been afraid.

  The throne fell from our hands and dropped through the tangle of our arms and wings and heads, plummeting away, a radiant speck in a blackening sea. I watched for a horrified moment, the bellow of Lucifer loud in my ears, as the golden throne grew smaller and smaller until it was gone, fallen back to Eden.

  And in the dream I was so familiar with early Eden that I could picture the throne there, shattered in glorious shambles among the shining stones of forgotten harmony, the physical wreck of our plan. But no—when I looked, Eden, that land of brightness, had gone dark. I could see no mote of light there at all. Careening from those heights, fleeing for the lower heavens away from the hands of the Host arrayed before the third heaven, I realized that the only source of light at all was Lucifer. Where were the bright stones of that garden, the great refracted brilliance of our prince, even from this distance?

  I had never seen the earth from so far away, had never looked down on it like this. Even so, I knew something was horribly wrong. And then I saw black engulfing the shadowed land, covering it like ink, rising up over it and creeping across the earth until it had seemingly digested it whole, the garden drowned by a sea of pitch.

  My world had gone as dark as a planet covered by a shroud, the black cloak of what we had done blotting out everything else.

  Lucifer veered away from the onslaught of the angels, a
nd I woke as the rebels, having nowhere else to go, took after him. I saw him, through the loosening fibers of sleep, leading them away: a bright light trailing stars, a comet and its sparkling tail.

  IN THE SPACE OF a night, the ambition for heaven and darkness of Eden had become more real to me than my own home, than the tangled sheets of my bed. The face of that seraph was more horrific than any terror conceived of my own mind. I smelled the brine of sweat, felt its grime on my arms. Never had I experienced emotion in such terrible, pure form. Not even in the torture of facing an unfaithful spouse.

  Perhaps this was his revenge for my walking out of the tea shop. If it was, I had no way to confront him, no knowledge—if I had ever had any—of when I would encounter him again.

  The next morning, as I sat at my desk, erratic script emerging from my pen, I was seized by a thought. Opening my laptop, I turned it on and pulled up my schedule.

  10:30 p.m.: L.

  12:00 a.m.: L.

  And again, in blocks between 1:00 a.m. until 4:00 a.m.:

  L.

  L.

  L.

  6

  Bodies flowed around me in Park Street Station like water around a stone. Some regarded me with passing curiosity. Some of them looked me directly in the eye. I stared back, half fearful that I would find recognition in their eyes, half afraid that I would not.

  I’m going crazy.

  A woman in her fifties paused to assess me. “Are you lost, hon?” she asked with frank kindness. “Do you need some help?”

  Is that you, Lucian, you devil? I sought the dark glint behind her eyes—that hint of shadow—but jerked away when she might have touched my sleeve. She shook her head and left me there, even as my attention landed on a man in a trench coat. Was he wearing an expensive watch? Or there—that young mother with the curly haired toddler. Or the tourist studying the T map. . . or that woman with the circles under her eyes. Her hands were cracked. Perhaps she worked as a maid in one of the inns off Newbury Street. She looked tired and worn. Was she ever visited by demons?

  I eventually became aware of a young man studying me from several feet away. The faint hint of a moustache dirtied his lip. He was as pale as a computer junkie; he had that fueled-by-Fritos-and-Red-Bull look about him. A brown, stubby ponytail spurted from the back of his head, half-obscured by the rumpled collar of his long, open jacket. It hung loosely on his shoulders, oversized on his thin frame. Skinny, dressed straight from a thrift shop, he should have looked like a charity case, but he managed to come off grunge-band cool, his unflappability as much a part of his ensemble as his faded Animals Taste Good T-shirt. I had been intimidated by that brand of tattered-jeans confidence in others when I was his age. As he dragged an appraising look up and down over me like a store checkout scanner, I found that the feeling carried over into adulthood. I suddenly felt grossly inadequate—not to mention pretentious—in my Eddie Bauer jacket and loafers.

  “Are we going to stand here all day?” he asked.

  I searched for a witty comeback, but I hadn’t had one when Jake Salter had picked on me in high school, and I didn’t have one now. I followed him up the stairs, onto Tremont.

  “And you needn’t worry any more about Jake.” His speech and the slight, strange accent were at weird odds with his human mundane. “He died a few years ago.”

  I had been on the verge of railing at him for hijacking my dreams but faltered at this news.

  “I didn’t know.” The Jake Salters of the world still seemed untouchable to me, their flannel shirts and army boots armor against a society in which the greatest peril was a white-collar eventuality.

  The demon shrugged. “Why would you?”

  “How?” I envisioned a drug overdose, alcohol poisoning, a motorcycle crash. A knife fight.

  He cocked his head toward the same invisible horde of insects I had noticed that first night at Esad’s. I shuddered.

  “A boating accident. On the Missouri River. He drowned and left a wife. Ah, and three children. Would you like to know more?”

  “No,” I said, numb, and then again, “No.” Family. Kids. Even Jake Salter had his act together. I couldn’t even stay married five years. And then I felt guilty. Act together or not, Jake was dead. Why did it always seem to happen like that?

  “It always does seem to happen like that,” he said, far too young in human years to utter such words, far too dispassionate regardless of his true age.

  “Stop it! Stop reading my mind! And what was that with the dreams? How dare you!” A couple stopped to stare as I turned on him. I had become one of those people I always steered clear of.

  “Do you think I could have done that differently? I couldn’t have. I need you to know. It was the only way.” He had said something similar that first night at the café. I heard the echo of it now, bits and pieces of that first conversation flitting along with it.

  “How about just telling me next time?” I said over the iteration and counterpart of our first conversations, as someone shouts with headphones on. I clutched at my head, realized with belated awareness that I was close to hysteria. I hadn’t slept well. I had lost enough weight in the last two weeks that my pants were loose—something I would normally be glad of but under the circumstances found slightly alarming—and was so behind at work that I had started to wonder if my job might be in jeopardy. It had been well over two months since I had brought any proposals to the editorial committee, and I was behind in getting the ones that had made it through ready for the publishing board with sales and marketing. The slush pile on my desk—the queries and manuscript samples sent in by agents and would-be writers—had grown to such a proportion that I had been forced to clear a space on my bookshelf to accommodate what wouldn’t fit on my credenza. I had more than a hundred e-mails in my in-box and fourteen voice mails that I repeatedly resaved under the delusion that I would return them before week’s end.

  To top it all off, I just noticed this morning that I had begun to sprout bumpy hives on my chest, underarms, and back.

  “I have so much to tell you, Clay. And we’ve so little time,” he said, the echoes of prior conversations subsiding with this statement. There was nothing youthful in the shake of his head.

  “You’re obsessed with time, you know that?”

  “You would be, too. Maybe you should be.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Come on. It’s a lovely day.”

  THE COMMON WAS ALIVE with the desperate festivity that comes with the last warm day of the season. Couples pushed children in strollers. Brownstone Brahmins walked their dogs, and couples dozed, curled up in quilts. A coed football game was in progress on the lawn, and leaves were everywhere, the trees having thrown their autumnal parade seemingly overnight, leaving behind a slew of red, yellow, and orange confetti.

  I hadn’t been to the Common since last year’s July 4 when we—Dan, Sheila, Aubrey, and I—had decided to camp out on a patch of grass to get a good view of the fireworks. Aubrey was distant that day, and her moodiness had irritated me. Two days later, I found the e-mail from Richard.

  Now here I was again, this time with either a demon or a psychopathic, albeit talented, hypnotist—part of me still clung to the shrinking possibility that an explanation might still be found in this corporeal world—and last year’s Fourth of July seemed as surreal a life as my new one had become.

  We were walking toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in the direction of the Public Garden, but even now I could see the blackness of Eden, the blaze of light that was Lucifer, the trailing stream of angels that followed him in a fleeing Milky Way of bright bodies. But before I would hear more, I wanted something.

  “You said that first night that you came at great risk.” “Yes.”

  “What’s the risk?”

  Lucian sighed heavily, as though it would take great effort to explain. “Is it not enough that I have assumed it?”

  I was silent.

  “I’m sure you would agree that t
his is highly unconventional,” he said at last.

  To say the least.

  “It would not be looked well upon, my talking with you.”

  “By whom?”

  “By just about any of them. Us. Enough now. This does not serve my purpose.”

  “Your purpose? What about mine? I’ve spent an entire night falling from heaven, and you know what? I’m exhausted.”

  “What do you want, Clay?” He sounded weary, and this aggravated me even more.

  “I want to know why! If this is dangerous for you—and I have no idea what kind of ramifications this will have for me—I want at least to know why you’re doing it.”

  “I told you you were safe. Any ‘ramifications,’ as you call them, will be those of your own making. As for why I’m doing this, I’ve already told you that as well. I’m not going to waste our time answering the same question twice.”

  I had hoped, if he answered it again, that I might glean some small detail more because, although I had heard his reasons, I did not understand them. Why would a demon want his memoirs published? And why by me? He had laughed at my first notion, that he was here to strike a devil’s bargain. But despite his irritation at my asking again, I could not help feeling that there was something more.

  “I saw Lucifer leading you away, but I didn’t see where he took you.”

  The demon tromped alongside me, his pasty skin and black boots a decided 180 after the stylish redhead, the dignified black man. “We assumed he would lead us to a place of our own. A place of his making—as though he had truly become, in that short time, a god. As though he cared for us and would recreate that garden and walk in it among us. But he led us nowhere.” He looked up toward the tops of the trees, their branches like the sparse scalps of aging men.