<
In answer, he dropped immediately into character, making his avatar pace restlessly within his prison. The lines of his sigil pulsed faintly with each footfall. Rashida could recite each in-game material she had been obliged to gather in order to scribe the lines of that symbol.
“Have you called me here merely to gawk upon my form?” Marchosias demanded. “I am, I admit, magnificent. In infernal hierarchies, I am a mighty Marquis, but all my power is wasted if you keep me in bondage.” He entered the command that made his character flex, the great span of his wings evoking a rain of sparks where they brushed along the circle’s edges.
She smiled to herself. The mouse let her move Avila more smoothly and she slowly strode across the length of the chamber to show how deeply she was thinking about the possibilities he represented. Finally, she made her character do the little hair-flip, turning back to Marchosias. “I rather like you in bondage, my demon.” She had a spell that would hold him in chains for the span of a few seconds and briefly considered using it. The coiled links would be a lovely sight against that tawny, muscled skin. “I do find your form to be pleasing.”
“I wear this skin especially for you,” he answered. “My true face, I fear, is frightful and you would not love me.”
Avila turned her head to the side in a way that suggested casual disinterest. Rashida hadn’t done that intentionally—it was one of the game’s pre-programmed fidgets, randomized to give the characters a feel of greater life. But it was perfect. “Few of us are exactly what we seem, demon,” she said. “Do you think such threats will impress me?”
“You misunderstand, my lady. I only seek freedom,” he wrote. “You called me for some purpose, surely. Are you not lonely?”
The question could easily have been flirtation, but it felt more like he could see her, a sad figure curled in a dark room, alone on a two-person bed. Tears came hot and without warning. She scowled through the blur at her keyboard, angry at herself for crying. Avila’s glib bravado escaped her completely and she just scrubbed at her eyes, sniffling.
<>
His concern was palpable. She started typing an answer, but her fingers fumbled and all the words came out wrong. Furiously, she backspaced. She could barely see the screen.
<>
Irrationally, she felt him beside her—a quiet presence, subtle and stabilizing. Pure fantasy, of course, but it helped lessen the bleak emptiness of the bed. With desperate indulgence, she imagined the flesh of him, warm and solid. Her face pressed to the strength of his shoulder, his arms both tender and protective. Hunter hadn’t touched her like that for weeks, and with a hunger, she missed it.
<
<
The name jolted her. She’d never typed it, never even implied it in all their deep discussions the other night. Avila was her escape hatch—useful especially because she wasn’t Rashida and never could be. And she wasn’t an idiot. She knew the dangers of the Internet. Stalkers. Hackers. Serial killers who chose their victims through online hook-ups. Every cautionary tale she’d ever heard suddenly seemed plausible—and then she fixed upon the simplest and most mortifying of solutions.
<
<
But the living room was dark and empty.
“Hunter?” It came out a squeak. She licked her lips and tried again, fingers slick against the brass of the handle. The name rang hard and flat against walls crowded with bookshelves. She dared to take a step beyond the bedroom, only half-conscious that she’d been gripping the door like some kind of plywood shield.
It wasn’t a big apartment. She checked the kitchen, the bathroom, even the closets. No Hunter. His computer was off, and when she put her hand on the tower, it was cooling. Unsettled and bewildered, she never considered that he might have left her. Marchosias dragged at her thoughts like a gravity well. Her curiosity couldn’t escape him. Maybe he was someone from the guild, playing Whimsy out of pity or to punk her. How awful would it be to spill her guts about Hunter only to have all those secret agonies spread across the guild site where everyone could mock them?
And then another thought occurred to her, so far beyond the realm of possibility that it held a certain wild allure.
What if Marchosias really was a demon?
You’re losing it, girl, she chided herself. So far ‘round the bend, you’ve found the other side.
But wouldn’t it be amazing? Breathless and terrible and more than a little transgressive. Haltingly, she stepped back into the bedroom. The laptop angled on a fold in the comforter, twisted in her exit so the screen partly faced the doorway. The golden-skinned demon stood beckoning from his circle, crimson eyes lasered in her direction.
<
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<
<
She couldn’t muster a comeback. The air in the room bent and grew heavy, like tattered wings draped around her shoulders. Her vision pinholed on that white-on-black chat bubble and all the unlikely magic it promised. She could almost smell Marchosias now, a startling mix of musk and clove and cinder. All the spit abandoned her mouth and her heart raced until its throb wavered like a caged thing seeking escape from the prison of her ribs.
<
She tried to lose herself in a book, but all she had was paranormal romance. That wasn’t helping, so she logged into her desktop to scour the Internet. Every site on demons or demonology that looked at least a little legit, she read. She even skimmed the sketchy ones. And Marchosias was on all of them. He was one of seventy-two demons supposedly connected with the Bible’s King Solomon. A book called the Goetia held the sigils for summoning them. She found a copy of it hosted on a website and scrolled straight to the entry on Marchosias. She couldn’t drag her eyes from the screen. The sigil from the demonic text was identical to the one her character had learned in Whimsy. Stranger than that was his description. Serpent’s tail, head of a wolf, griffin’s wings. When he appeared, he vomited flame, just like the beast in her nightmare. But she couldn’t have known that. She’d never read any of these books before, had simply assumed the sigil and name were both created by Whimsy’s developers.
She did an image search for Marchosias and found something that looked so close to the wolf-thing from her dream that she almost couldn’t look at it. Impulsively, she saved it to her desktop.
The door slammed and she startled so hard she nearly peed a little. Hunter was home. Guiltily, she ALT-tabbed out of the Goetia and did her best to ignore the presence of her boyfriend. But it was a small apartment, and he came right over. She smelled the pizza before he set the oily box on the desk next to her, shoving some of her books aside so it wouldn’t tip onto the floor.
“Brought you dinner,” he said. Awkwardly, he held out a single hothouse rose, likely bought at the corner gas station. “I was kind of a dick earlier.”
Rashida shoved away from her computer, the casters of her desk chair catching on the carpet. This always happened. He’d pull some shit that royally pissed her off, and then, once he had a little time to think about it, he’d do something random and hopelessly endearing. She tried to cling to her revelation from earlier, but the shock at seeing
the wolf-thing had already scattered most of her anger.
“Go on,” he insisted. His smile was lopsided. “Take it. You got to stop being so sensitive, Rashi. You know I care about you.”
Grudgingly, she accepted the flower. The rose was bruised and smelled weirdly of glass cleaner. She pressed it to her nose anyway. It was a start for an apology.
“We good?” he asked, flipping open the box to reach for a slice of pizza. The bacon, sausage, and pepperoni glistened with juices. “You walked all the way to Hammond’s and back in that heat. I couldn’t believe it.” He caught a cheesy wad of pepperoni before it slid to the floor. A blob of red sauce nested in his beard. “You know I talk shit, baby, but I never really mean it.”
She set the flower aside, hesitating before taking her own piece from the pizza box. Strands of molten cheese adhered to the cardboard. “Can we discuss that, maybe?” she ventured. She searched around for a napkin. “I feel like we’ve forgotten how to talk.”
He dropped into his own chair at the desk across from hers, disappearing behind the arc of the monitor. “Come on, babe, let’s not ruin this.” He peeked around the obstruction and shot her that goofy smile again. “Why don’t we eat, maybe play something, and see how the rest of the night goes?”
“Um, sure,” she answered. “Just hold on a sec.” Lofting her slice of pizza well away from the keyboard, she closed out completely from the Goetia. Her mouse hovered over the wolf-thing image, then she dragged it to the trash bin. That wasn’t Marchosias. Marchosias—the player—was just a gamer like she was, human and depressingly ordinary on the other side of his screen.
“What are you up for?” Hunter asked. “There’s a seasonal event in Dune Strider. Double xp for the rest of the weekend. How about we both roll new characters and smash through the starting zone?”
“That’s the one where you’ve been asleep for millennia and wake up in a post-apocalyptic future?”
He nodded, already booting up.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll need to update, but that sounds fun.”
She spent the rest of the night gaming with Hunter. It reminded her of the fun they used to have just hanging out together. He had work in the morning, so they went to bed early. On their sagging mattress, as she curled next to him, she felt cautiously hopeful. If she put enough work into it, maybe she could mend the cracks in their relationship.
***
On Tuesday, he hit her. It was over the stupidest thing. She had burned dinner.
He opened his hand at the last instant, slapping instead of striking, but her ears rang and her cheek stung and she was certain it would bruise come morning. When it happened, she just stood there at first, staring. They both did—but then he started spouting excuses, apologies, rationalizations. She heard none of them. The thunder of blood was in her ears—blood, and a calm, bright fury. She moved to get past him and out of the kitchen. She already knew what she wanted. He shifted to block her way, holding his hands up to show he wouldn’t strike her a second time—as if that was any kind of promise. She shoved as hard as she could and though it didn’t do much to move him, it shocked him into moving himself.
That was enough.
She marched straight for the bedroom, locking the door behind her. He pounded from the other side, demanding she open it and calling her stupid. She had to come out sometime, he said. This wasn’t solving anything.
But her solution sat closed and waiting on the nightstand. The laptop led to Whimsy, and Whimsy led to Marchosias. And maybe, if the world were as kind as it was cruel, Marchosias could offer some justice.
That was one of the things that she’d learned when reading about demons. A lot of those seventy-two spirits named in the Goetia solved problems for the people bold enough to summon them. They tracked thieves, hunted murderers, punished the unfaithful. Abusive boyfriends weren’t named explicitly on the list, but Marchosias’s entry had said that he was loyal.
With Hunter prying at the doorknob, she booted up Whimsy and logged into her alter-ego. Avila still stood in the subterranean chamber, the circle of summoning glimmering before her. The candleshine on her purple skin was beautiful, but not half as captivating as the tawny being lounging on the stones marked with his sigil. Fully aware of her scrutiny, the demon’s head tilted to meet Rashida’s eyes in the real world. This time, he didn’t bother slipping into character.
“You return, my lady.” The words blazed in his white-on-black chat bubble, but she heard him, too, like the sound of distant thunder. “I’ve been waiting.”
“I know,” she whispered as she typed. “I have something for you to do.”
Fluidly, he rose to his feet, peering up at her from the confines of the video game. But he wasn’t just there, and they both knew it. Clove and musk and cinder filled every corner of the room. Hunter pounded the door, oblivious. The air tightened, then trembled, perched upon the lip of the impossible.
“I am your willing servant.” He bowed his head, catching her gaze from under thick lashes. “But you know you must release me first.”
She wet her lips, nodding. She thought of the past ten months with Hunter and all the time before that, believing she would die before ever finding someone who could love her. Lightly, she touched her cheek, feeling the stinging heat that lingered. There would definitely be a bruise tomorrow.
“I release you,” she said. She didn’t bother to type it—she spoke aloud and clearly, in a voice that did not waver.
Something in the room shifted, shivered, then cascaded in a burst of light. A sound, like the tearing of canvas, rippled through the air. The door shook as if a great beast leapt against it.
She was surprised to feel nothing when Hunter began to scream.
EPHIPPAS
Ephippas makes an appearance in the pseudepigraphical Testament of Solomon. At one point King Solomon receives a letter from Adares, king of the Arabians, who asks for his help in subduing a troublesome demon, whose “terrible blast … kills man and beast. And no (counter-) blast is ever able to withstand this demon.” At the same time Solomon’s project of building the Temple in Jerusalem hits an impasse when the stone intended to be the cornerstone proves to be immovable by both the artisans and the demons who are working on the construction.
Solomon remembers Adares’s letter and sends a servant to Arabia, who uses the king’s ring to capture Ephippas in a flask. Brought to Solomon, Ephippas walks about in the flask for seven steps before collapsing. Impressed that the demon can move the flask at all while inside it, Solomon asks who he is and by whom he can be thwarted. (Each devil has a corresponding angel that can thwart him.) Ephippas replies, “By the one who is going to be born of a virgin and be crucified by the Jews.” This response suggests Ephippas’s enormous power, because it implies that he cannot be thwarted by any mere angel or archangel, but only by the Son of God himself.
When asked about his powers, the demon says, “Wheresoever I will, I alight and set fire and do to death…I am able to move mountains, to carry houses from one place to another, and to overthrow kings.” Solomon bids him to move the cornerstone that was too heavy for his workers. Ephippas not only complies but, aided by the spirit Abezethibou, brings up a massive pillar out of the Red Sea and sets it up before the Temple in Jerusalem. Solomon binds them with his ring, and they are forced to support the pillar in midair. (Some scholars identify the pillar with the pillar of cloud mentioned in the Old Testament, e.g., in Exodus 13:21-22, and also say that it stands for the Milky Way.)
AN ANGEL PASSES
WHITLEY STRIEBER
You can’t see wind, but you sometimes wish you could. Good wind, wind of change, ill wind. Carried away by the wind.
This particular evening, deep in summer, promised only soft skies, friendly skin and the intimacies passing between four people in love. Jake and Terry and Mike and Merry lay like flopped seals around Mike and Merry’s dark, leaf-choked swimming pool. True, the surface of the water already trembled with little breezes, but they di
dn’t care. Night wind was ordinary in their part of the world. Summer wind.
They were neighbors in a Los Angeles desert suburb called Franklin Ranch, a place so undistinguished that neighbors, even in less expensive developments, generally referred to it, if at all, as “over there.” To most, it existed as distant rooftops marching some undulating hill-sides in the distance. That part of California is curved like a woman.
Neither couple had kids, which was just as well considering their many peculiar ideas and dangerous habits.
Jake had been in prison in Nebraska for posing as a door-to-door bible salesman. His father, who had been a poker cheat, had taught him one of the world’s great secrets, which is that most people will believe a lie over the truth every time, and the more cockamamie the lie, the stronger their will to believe.
There’s money in that.
Not being as quick-fingered as his father, he had instead developed his gab. His dad helped him at it, teaching him the technique of going low in the voice at the height of the lie, and making eye contact with a little hurt in your face, as if suggesting that you’ll be crushed if they don’t believe.
He skillfully sold bibles that did not actually exist to Midwesterners concerned about their lives of sin. He would arrive in some uneasy little community, hold their hands and weep with them over their personal responsibility for Jesus’s lingering death on the cross and the sad improbability of their own salvation.
He would work until he got them on their knees with him. When that happened, he knew he had a deal. He would close it with the solemnity of a funeral director and say, “You’re one of the chosen. I don’t say this often, but there are some customers I want to bring into my life.”
If an attractive female, he did that forthwith. No matter what, none of them ever heard from him again. Except for Terry who captured him, of course…
He would take their cash, run their cards on his phone, or cash their checks as need be.
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