The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  Solomon relies on Asmodeus to help him build the Temple. Solomon has been ordered by God not to permit the sound of any tools at the site, and Asmodeus, captured and chained by Solomon’s men, tells him that he needs a magical item called the shamir. By some accounts, the shamir is a tiny worm the size of a grain of wheat that has the power to cut down trees and hew slabs of stone; by another account it is a blue stone, and wherever it is placed, and the ineffable Name of God whispered, the rock breaks into the desired shape and size. Asmodeus tells Solomon that the shamir is guarded by a wild cock, and explains how to get it from him.

  But the climactic encounter between Solomon and Asmodeus comes when Solomon asks the demon, “In what way is your power greater than ours?” Asmodeus replies, “Remove the chain from my back and give me your ring, and I will show you how great is my power.” Solomon complies. Asmodeus swallows the ring, throws Solomon a distance of six hundred miles, and takes the throne, posing as the king. The exiled Solomon resorts to begging at doorways. He only manages to convince the Jewish Sanhedrin (high council) of his identity when his wives report that the disguised Asmodeus comes to them wearing socks, to conceal his feet, which are shaped like those of a cock.

  This sequence of tales shows the progress of Asmodeus in Jewish legend. Starting as a purely evil figure, he becomes a clever trickster whose help can be gotten under certain circumstances.

  THE FLOOR OF THE BASEMENT IS THE ROOF OF HELL

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

  The contractor’s name was Terry. He hadn’t been on Candy and Jason’s initial shortlist, but she’d seen his company truck the next block over, at the Martindales’, and copied the number down. Now here they were at dinner, which Terry insisted on paying for since he could business-expense it. Before getting into the particulars of their situation, he introduced himself and his business via a story from his childhood, about dropped nails on his father’s construction projects. For every hundred straight ones he found he would get a dollar, and his father’s workers would get a talking to about carelessness and waste and safety. The guys on-site hated him, Terry said, leaning back from his plate, his glass of wine left, Candy thought, strategically full.

  It’s important that potential clients situate him somewhere between a lush and a teetotaler, she imagined. It’s good to have appetites, just, it’s bad to indulge them.

  As for his story about the nails, she imagined it was what he opened every sales pitch with, since it established that he A) ran a clean site, B) was in a family business, and C) had once been a cute adorable kid.

  Terry was the second contractor they were interviewing, but the first one to take them out to dinner on his card. In the final analysis, when stacked up against a two-month, seventy-five thousand dollar job—foundation work is neither cheap nor convenient—a dinner somewhere north of a hundred didn’t really amount to much. But it was a good restaurant, Candy had to admit, and it’s not like Terry was hard on the eyes or anything. She and Jason had ordered the salmon, as they’d agreed to do until they looked closer to the thirty they could still remember than the forty they were fast approaching, and Terry had the sugar steak the restaurant was known for, that the kitchen wouldn’t dare cook anywhere even approaching medium well.

  She asked Terry how much he’d made, collecting all those guilty nails.

  “Gambled it all away betting on kickball,” he said. “Fourth grade was rough.”

  So, Candy appreciated: D) a sense of humor as well.

  Terry wiped his mouth with his napkin, as if signaling that the banter portion of this was drawing to a sad but necessary close. Time for the business.

  What Candy and Jason needed, they explained, was for their two-story house not to crack in half. Evidently a fault line of sorts had developed in the foundation. Jason blamed it on the drought.

  Terry nodded about this possibility while chewing his steak. By the way he neither dismissed Jason’s idea nor ratified it with anecdote, Candy could tell he was humoring him. That, in his line of business, he knew every reason a foundation might start to crumble. And none of those reasons had anything to do with a lack of rain.

  To save Terry the awkwardness of trying to show some modicum of respect for Jason’s idea, Candy dropped into the story of how, in the sprawling basement, they’d found a gun-safe room that had been on neither the listing nor the blueprint, that the realtor said probably would have upped the appraisal by twenty-five thousand, at least.

  “Hidden door,” Jason added, leaning forward as if the neighboring table might be trying to tune this conversation in.

  “Probably a panic room,” Terry said, dabbing the corner of his mouth again. “Just doubled-up for the gun collection. Guns weren’t still in there, were they?”

  Jason shook his head no.

  “Still has a dirt floor,” Candy leaned forward to say, as if this wasn’t information she wanted said too loud.

  “Under the subfloor thing,” Jason added, looking satisfied with himself for having known that word.

  “Hunh,” Terry said, narrowing his eyes in thought. “That is kind of… oh, yeah. It’s unfinished. Of course. The dirt floor makes it count as technically unfinished. When the house was built, the builder was probably instructed to leave it like that, just raw. One unfinished room in a basement means the whole basement is unfinished, as far as property taxes go. Then another crew came in, finished it out under the radar. Know anything about the previous owner? The paranoid type?”

  “Short sale,” Jason said with a shrug. “Think it was a foreclosure.”

  “No cement in the toilets or anything, right?” Terry raised his hand for the ticket. Before Jason or Candy could say anything about the toilets, Terry added, “That room probably wasn’t floored with concrete because—did you know concrete is exothermic? That means it breathes out all this heat as it dries. If somebody got their work orders backwards, if the walls were already painted, then that concrete, drying, could have peeled the paint back off.”

  “Thus, a subfloor,” Candy said.

  “Probably sealed,” Terry said, taking what felt like a celebratory first drink from his glass of pinot. “You can spray this… it doesn’t matter. Listen, no charge, nothing extra, I’ll go down there, I’ll look into it, make sure it’s nothing you’re going to have to deal with years down the road, right? You want this to be your last big job on the house, don’t you?”

  Jason and Candy nodded, did want this to be over once and for all.

  “How was the—?” he said, indicating the salmon they’d each taken the fewest possible bites of.

  “Flaky, buttery…” Jason tried, holding his hand up in the air for the perfect word. “How do you describe fish?”

  “Delicious,” Candy proclaimed. “Thank you.”

  Terry signed the credit card slip, closed the leather folder back over it, and the next morning, Jason and Candy cancelled the third interview they had scheduled, and signed with Terry.

  ***

  That night, a loaf of French bread devoured between them at the kitchen island, along with most of a bottle of wine, Candy and Jason celebrated the end of the interview grind by fucking in the hallway between the office and the front living room. The idea was that, if Candy laid back on the pillow Jason had chivalrously retrieved from the bedroom upstairs, then she would be lying directly on a line that bisected the house—the fault line, the crack.

  She tied a scarf around Jason’s eyes and told him to imagine he was giving it to the house, and, while he wasn’t looking, she closed her eyes too, imagined there were golden nails scattered all around her, and that they weren’t at all distracting Terry from his thrusts.

  Afterward, even though it matched nothing, she arranged that pillow in a corner of the couch. The game between Candy and Jason for years had been that that pillow, left out, was an invitation, a suggestion, a slow lick of the lips.

  Never mind that it was the busy season for Jason, that he was out of town again in the morning.

 
; It’s for when he gets back, she told herself. It’s for him to see when he leaves, to make sure he doesn’t miss his flight home. It’s to remind him about just now.

  Candy walked along the back of the couch and let her fingertips brush the sticky top of the pillow, and then she happened to look through the ceiling-to-floor front window.

  There was a vehicle out there, at the gate, wasn’t there?

  Yes. Just a vague shape, the almost-glint of a windshield.

  A pickup? No headlights, no dome light.

  But trucks don’t ease up and park all by themselves.

  Candy walked to the window, could see the truck no better. But, turning back to the house, she could see directly down the hall where the rug was still scrunched up on one side from her grabbing it, to keep from sliding off the fault line.

  She pursed her lips in a smile, hoped Jason hadn’t gotten the house pregnant.

  She also hoped it had been a good enough show.

  She would have to remember to check the outside of that window, for smudges, for smears.

  “What has gotten into you, girl?” she said out loud, mischievously. She had an immediate answer for that, too.

  Candy smiled, followed the handrail upstairs.

  ***

  The next morning she texted Kath Martindale from the next street over, to ask if it was too early to call. Kath texted right back, and they were talking over their separate coffees a moment later.

  What Candy wanted was the scoop on Terry.

  “Who?” Kath asked, switching ears with her phone it sounded like.

  “Your contractor?” Candy said back. “Looks like the Marlboro Man if he didn’t smoke? I saw his white pickup at your house the other day.”

  “A white truck?” Kath said.

  “You had your foundation worked on?” Candy prompted.

  “Oh, oh, yes,” Kath said. “I let Ben deal with all of that. There isn’t enough Xanax in the world, right? I was at my sister’s for most of it. Have you seen my tan?”

  Candy hadn’t, but for the next ten minutes she heard about it, until a knock on the door saved her.

  It was Terry, in the flesh. He peeled his sunglasses from his weathered face and scuffed his boots on the welcome mat. Behind him, diesel engines were firing up and a large truck was delivering a port-a-pottie. Candy hadn’t considered that aspect of all this. But of course. She couldn’t have men tromping in at all hours of the day for the half-bath by the kitchen.

  “Yes?” she said, and then stepped aside to invite Terry in, out of the clamor and bustle of what was now, obviously, a job site.

  Dinner Terry had been at home in the elegance of the restaurant, directing the wait staff around without having to say a word. Daytime Terry was at a loss for where to start.

  Candy stole a glance down, to be sure her robe wasn’t open. Well, that it wasn’t open too much.

  “Jason around?” Terry finally got out.

  “He’s probably at cruising altitude by now,” Candy said, tilting her head up into the idea of the wide blue sky. “Can I help you?”

  “It’s just,” Terry stammered, “we usually—we assign, or, we ask someone to run point on the project.”

  “That’s not you?”

  “The homeowner, I mean,” Terry said. “Just for any questions, any decisions, that sort of stuff.”

  “That’s me,” Candy said. Then, about the yarn bracelet Terry was wearing, “Your daughter?”

  “Son,” Terry said, showing off the bracelet. “My daughter’s still teething.”

  “You’re lucky,” Candy said. “Kids, I mean.”

  Terry nodded that he was indeed lucky, then Roff, Jason’s oversized poodle, was bustling and barking down the stairs, and Candy had to oversee that big meet and greet.

  The procedure, as Terry outlined it, gaining confidence, was designed to be as noninvasive as possible. He instructed her to secure any china in cabinets, as there would be episodes of shaking. There was simply no avoiding that; digging under the house at an angle with heavy equipment was a shaky enterprise—but safe, safe, he guaranteed. He’d never damaged a house in fifteen years.

  Candy offered him lemonade. He accepted.

  Standing in the foyer, tousling Roff’s curls, he detailed the next step: inserting massive hydraulic jacks under the house, lifting it as few inches as possible—there were waterlines to be aware of—and fitting pylons underneath, to take some of the strain of the house’s weight off the foundation. But that meant carving down deep enough to find some bedrock to anchor those pylons to.

  “The basement stairs?” Candy asked. Because those jacks would be under the house proper, not the basement. She pictured the staircase to the basement accordioning out… out… and then snapping in two.

  “On my to-do list,” Terry said, tapping his notebook with the eraser of his wide, flat pencil.

  “What about the gun room?”

  “That old panic room…” Terry said, as if just remembering. “It’ll be fine, of course, but I should check it out. We don’t want to dig too close, collapse a wall.”

  “This way,” Candy said, and very intentionally led him down the hall from last night, stopped to step out of her house shoe, straighten that scrunch of rug with her toes. Terry’s face gave nothing away.

  Roff bounded downstairs before them into the cold of the basement, and Candy, on the way back to the last door on the right, the one so flush with the wall that it disappeared, explained that they didn’t even know what to do with all this space, all this extra.

  “Mother-in-law suite?” Terry said, peering around.

  “Not in my lifetime,” Candy said with a chuckle, and then they were there.

  “Fifteen by fifteen,” Terry said, standing beside Jason’s weight bench. Besides the mounts on the wall for rifles and shotguns and maybe pistols, the weight bench was the only thing in the room.

  “Mind?” Terry said, already feeling along the edge of the carpet by the wall.

  Candy stepped back, let him fold the carpet back then find a panel in the subfloor, work it up from its fitting.

  “Dirt all right. Come feel, though.”

  Candy knelt by him, touched her fingertips to the dirt, not sure what to expect.

  It was like the desserts on a restaurant cart: plastic. Fake. Dirt just for show. The look of dirt, but not the feel. Not a grain of soil would dislodge.

  “It’s kind of been…” Terry said, searching for words, “like, sprayed with superglue. A sealant. Keeps moles and mold back.” He worked a screwdriver up from his pocket, flipped it around to tap the plastic handle onto the hard shell of dirt.

  “Oh,” Candy said, drawing her hand up to her mouth for some reason.

  “It’s a polymer, should last forever,” Terry said, and worked the subflooring back into place, smoothed the carpet over it. “To be honest, I wouldn’t do a thing to it, other than not think about it.”

  Candy agreed one hundred percent.

  Still, that night?

  She was thinking about it.

  Before seeing it, she’d only known about it, from Jason, who had told her he had no idea that was even a thing in the civilized world, leaving bare dirt in a home like that. Seeing the imitation dirt herself, though, that clear crust, that shell—now Candy couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  This whole time, it had been right here underneath them? A grubby little imperfection in an otherwise perfect home?

  By midnight she was back in Jason’s weight room, as she was calling it. She’d pulled the carpet back, managed to work that panel of subflooring up.

  In thriller movies, and in the Poe stories she remembered from a boyfriend or two before marrying Jason, this was always where you buried whoever you’d killed. It didn’t work out, of course, but it was exciting for a while. Especially when the detective would be walking right over the very patch of ground, effectively tamping the grave down with each footstep.

  Candy didn’t know anything about who had lived he
re before. Somebody paranoid enough to hire layers of workers to hide a room. Somebody who had been foreclosed upon. She reminded herself to call Kath, helpful helpful Kath, about that as well.

  She tapped her chin with her index finger and stared at the frozen-in-place dirt. Roff sniffed at it, must not have smelled like anything.

  “Well, well, inspector,” she said, and strolled ever so casually right across the dirt.

  It wasn’t quite even, but it didn’t give, either.

  Candy sat on Jason’s weight bench and wrapped a length of yellow yarn around and around her wrist. It was too long for any kind of sensible bracelet, of course, unless you tied it into a complicated fish tail or something. But summer camp workshops had been twenty years or more ago already. She wasn’t even sure what drawer she’d filched the yarn up from, walking through the house with all the lights on, a glass of red wine in hand.

  She inserted one of the yarn’s ragged ends into her mouth, in thought. And then she poured her nail polish remover onto what she was calling the hairsprayed dirt.

  Had Jason been in town, had he walked in in his gym shorts, his preppy towel wrapped around his neck like a deodorant commercial, Candy might have told him she was doing this because Terry had said that magic word “polymer,” which had made her think of how the nail salon smelled.