The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  Sunny clutched her messenger bag like a life preserver. “How… how the hell could you possibly… how?”

  “Because I’m the fucking duke of finding lost shit,” he said. “That’s all I could sniff off you without your blood. Now, you in, or you out, and if you’re out, shut the fucking door on your way. You’re killing my hotbox.”

  Sunny looked down at the pocket knife and carefully nicked her index finger with the blade. The skin sliced like warm butter, and a fat drop of her blood welled up. Agares stood, walked around the table and took her wounded hand by the wrist, tightly.

  “This is a deal,” he said, staring her in the eyes. His grip was very strong. “You make this deal, there’s no going back. You understand?” Sunny swallowed and nodded. Agares took her hand and pulled it to his face, slipped her bleeding finger into his mouth and sucked the blood away. An almost sexual light burned in his dead eyes for a moment, and she had to admit this felt strangely like her time flirting with BDSM, like this nasty old man was somehow claiming ownership of her. A little thrill went through her body at the feeling, and then she recalled why she had sucked at submission. She didn’t trust anyone that much. She pulled her finger away from Agares’s mouth and jerked her wrist free of his grasp. It was surprisingly easy.

  “Gross,” she said. “You satisfied?”

  The old man made a sound in the affirmative. It sounded like a growl.

  “We’re good,” he said. “Let me grab my shit and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t you want the money? You don’t even know who I want you to find.”

  “I do,” the old man said, grabbing a rumpled, canvas campaign jacket and a battered, leather outback hat from a pile of dirty clothes.

  He wrapped a belt around his virtually non-existent waist. A huge, sheathed Bowie knife hung off it. “Hang onto the money,” he said as he scooped some keys off the work desk and held them up. A large alligator tooth dangled from the keychain. “We’ll need it. I need to know something else right now, though.”

  “What?”

  “What do you want to do when you find him?”

  She paused, felt the velocity of her life rush through her, all the pain and chaos that had led her to this place, to this stranger. It struck her like the invisible anvil you hit at the moment of falling asleep, the weight of our lives, the iron of our sins.

  “I want to kill him,” she said.

  “Then I need your word. I need your promise now that you will see this through, that you will kill him when I find him.”

  “Okay,” Sunny said and rubbed her suddenly throbbing index finger. “You’ve got it.”

  “Then let’s boogie.” The old man strode past her and through the door.

  Outside it was dark, humid, damp. Sunny was at a loss. It had been midday when she arrived, and she hadn’t been inside with Agares longer than maybe 10 minutes, right?

  The gravel lot was empty except for her beat-up little Honda and the swamp truck she had parked next to. All the men at the shelter were gone, and so were their cars. A single, halogen light on a telephone pole bathed the area in dingy, white light, filtered through a frantic swarm of bugs orbiting the light like mad moons.

  Agares noticed her surprise. He grunted, which she suspected was the closest thing to a chuckle he had in him. “Yeah, things are going to get kinda fucked up for you from here on out,” he said. “Time, space, all that shit you people cling to to keep from losing your fucking minds, it’s going out the window.” He opened the driver-side door of the truck, climbed in with a groan. He nodded to the passenger door. “Get in.” She did.

  The cab smelled of tobacco and sweat. Crumpled coffee cups and fast-food wrappers huddled in the floorboard of the passenger seat. The little slide-out ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts and ash. The rifle rack mounted on the back window held a shotgun and a scoped 30-30 rifle. With a low rumble, the truck started like a live, hungry thing. The radio came alive, too. Mark Collie’s “In Time” playing on a ghostly local station.

  They started down the bouncing, twisting dirt road, Agares’s headlights jerking and clinging to the wet shadows of the massive beast that was the ‘glades. Looking out her side window, Sunny saw dark drops strike the wide leaves; they left a black trail as they raced to the oblivion of the edge and fell again. She looked ahead, dark drops of what looked like blood hitting the windshield. Unphased, Agares clicked on the wipers and the blood smeared and scattered under their relentless cycle.

  “Did you… drug me?” she asked, rolling down her window and sticking her hand out. It came back wet with rain.

  “You feel drugged?”

  Sunny kept looking at her hand and then back to the blood on the windshield. She shook her head, curtly.

  “You wanna?” he asked, grinning a tobacco-stained smile.

  “What the fuck did you do to me?” she asked. The anger came to her rescue and tamped down the fear.

  “You’re riding shotgun with me,” he said. “You gave blood, and you swore an oath to me. You see things the way they are now, not the way they want you to see them.”

  “They? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re crazy.”

  “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” he said, turning left past what looked to Sunny through the gauze of blood on the windshield like a massive, inhuman skull the size of a motor home. “Your senses are all you got to experience the world. They were built to lie to you. This is the world you really inhabit. Well, one of them, anyway.”

  “Let me the fuck out.”

  Agares slowed the truck and stopped. Sunny opened the door. She put one foot onto the muddy road. The air outside was hot and thick. Rain, not blood, struck her hair and face. Other than the truck’s lights, all was darkness and jagged shadow. Agares turned, regarding Sunny as she stood half in the truck and half out.

  “Your choice,” he said. “It’s always been your choice. Step on out, slam the door if it will make you feel better. Walk back to the compound—it’s about eight miles back—and drive home. Most likely, you will never see any weird shit again. You will also never find him, and you will wonder until your dying day what could have happened if you’d kept going. Then, you’ll die, and they will put your meat into the ground to rot. I won’t help you again, not in 10 minutes, not in 10 years, not in 10,000. You keep your bargain, and I’ll keep mine, but you always, always remember it was your choice.”

  She knew she should run, knew she was on the shores of some madness she had never known. She also felt the certainty in Agares’s voice. The old man would find him, and if she didn’t take this ride, she never would. It was the same feeling she had the first time she shot up at 17, the broken glass of her emotions stabbing her insides. She understood as she raised the needle to her skin that she was crossing a line she could never come back from. But she did it anyway.

  “Coming?” Agares asked. “Hurry up, you’re letting the goddamned mosquitoes in.”

  Sunny climbed back in the truck and shut the door.

  They drove on in silence, and the blood rain finally ended. The swamp gave way to a paved county road; the sky was gray mist choking the stars. Endless fields of sawgrass stretched in both directions, swaying in the tepid wind. Agares turned right, and they continued on.

  It felt like an hour had passed when Sunny saw a dark shape, a pyramid, hovering, spinning silently above the sawgrass fields off the right of the road. Small red and green lights twinkled across its black surface like alien fireflies. Below the pyramid, she thought she saw people, arms flailing in distress, heads bobbing into and out of view in the thicket of tough, sharp grass. She looked back as they passed, and now the pyramid was gone, replaced by a blinking radio tower of steel girders.

  “What the fuck did we just pass?”

  “What do you think?” Agares asked. “Radio tower or big floating pyramid? They’re both right to a point. Your blinders are slipping, because you’re riding with me.
”

  “This…”

  “Can’t be real, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m bored with that shit. Here’s a more interesting question, why do you want to kill him?”

  She went quiet, gazing at the dark horizon through the blood-smeared windshield.

  “Aw, come on now. You haven’t shut your trap since you walked in my door; now suddenly you’re giving me the silent treatment. Spill.”

  “You’re so goddamn prescient,” Sunny said. “Why you asking me?”

  “I don’t know everything,” Agares said. “I can teach you every single one of the nearly 7000 languages known to man on this Earth, and a few they don’t speak or even remember anymore. I can teach the biggest douchebag you can find how to be charming as fuck. I can make the ground tremble like a bride on her wedding night.”

  “And you’re humble, too,” Sunny said, the closest thing to a laugh she could summon brushing her voice.

  “And best of all,” Agares continued, “I can find any-fucking-thing or anyone, anywhere, and I can make them come home. I can see the things you’ve lost hanging on you like leaves on a tree, but I can’t read minds! I’m glad, too. It would be like being in a fucking library full of those insipid little Bazooka Joe comics that came in the gum.” Sunny looked at him blankly. “The ones folded around the stale, shitty gum that cracks your fucking teeth? Hello?” She shook her head and looked out the passenger window. “What I get for hanging out with fucking children.”

  They drove on and the swampland transformed to highway and waterways on either side of them. They were headed south. Sunny saw a boat made of bloated, putrid, water-logged bodies gliding through the black-glass water, a hooded giant standing at its stern, pushing it through the wetlands with a long wooden pole. A decapitated head, staring stupidly, was mounted on the pole.

  “Is this Hell?” she asked.

  “Nah,” Agares said. “Not yours, anyway, but you’re starting to get it now.”

  “Why can’t you just answer a straight question?”

  “Why can’t you?” he replied. “Why you going to kill this man I’m finding for you?”

  Sunny looked to the east, past the old man’s profile. The darkness was being ripped away by the scarlet lashes of the dawn. None of this made any sense except in the context of some kind of drug trip, or if she had died and gone to Hell, or maybe gone crazy again. No, crazy didn’t feel this way. She watched the sun struggle for a foothold against the tyranny of the night and sighed. “You got a cigarette, preferably not weed, since I’m pretty sure you dosed me.”

  Agares dug into one of his pockets and fished out a badly crumpled pack of smokes. She took one and handed it back to him. He snapped open a matte black Zippo and lit it for her.

  “This man, he took every bit of joy from my life,” she began. “Not accidentally, not without malice. He wasn’t clumsy, or stupid, or uncaring. No, if he had been any of those, I could forgive him, forget it. He set out to poison me, poison my life, and he succeeded. I’m already dead in all the ways that really matter. I want him dead before I finish up dying. I want the cabròn to know it was me that did it.”

  They continued on the highway for a long time. Sunny noticed that the road signs all bore strange alien script that made her think of worms squirming in a hot skillet. Oddly, the billboards were all very sweet, positive images with a golden, almost glowing script, equally alien. They gave her a strange sense of comfort and a desire to relax, to stay calm. It was like reading Prozac. Agares stuck his arm out the open window and gave one of the billboards the finger as they passed.

  What seemed like a few hours later, Agares pulled the pickup over to the side of the highway. He climbed out with a creak of his back and legs and a groan.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting directions.” The old man walked to the center of the highway. Sunny opened her door and stretched. Everything felt like dream time, dream logic. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours at most since she’d pulled into the gravel lot of the alligator farm. But her body was responding as if she had been cooped up in the truck, driving all night. Agares was scanning the struggling eastern light. He put his fingers to his lips and let off a high-pitched whistle. After a few seconds, there was a distant shriek of reply, and a dark cataract appeared in the opening eye of the dawn. It grew as it came closer to them. It was a hawk, a big one, too.

  The animal lighted gently on Agares’s forearm. Sunny saw the long, sharp talons carelessly pierce the old man’s skin. He didn’t even wince as dark streams ran from the wounds. He opened his mouth and the bird spilled something from its beak down his throat. The act nauseated Sunny. Agares swallowed and then leaned in close and whispered to the bird. He looked over to Sunny as he whispered, and she had a mortifying instant of feeling completely naked to his gaze. He finished telling the hawk whatever he had been saying, and the beautiful, powerful bird screeched in reply then took to the air and was soon out of sight.

  “Do you do card tricks and children’s parties too?” she asked as he ambled back toward the truck. “Maybe geek shows?”

  “Cute.” The old man grunted as he climbed into the cab. “I got eyes in the sky. Better’n satellites or drones. I got a lead on who you’re huntin’. Gonna have to make a detour onto someone else’s turf, though. Always dangerous.” He started up the truck and Sunny took her seat. They were on their way again.

  ***

  The night was coming again in all defiance of ordered time and space. The highway narrowed and became a causeway, blue-green water churning to either side, darkening with the sky. Miami jutted in the distance, a sprawling profile of neon, shadow, and stolen electrical fire burning from a thousand windows and streets. Sunny had grown up here, lived here her whole life, but this city was a stranger to her.

  Sunny checked her cell phone again, as she had all during the long journey. The screen glowed with the same unreadable golden script as the highway billboards and refused to function. It had been like this since she had started her journey with the old man. She turned to Agares. “I need to understand what’s happening,” she said. “I’ve tried to roll with all this like it’s some kind of weird hallucination, but it doesn’t feel like a drug; it doesn’t feel like crazy. Can you please tell me what’s going on? Why am I seeing these things? What do they mean?”

  “Please,” Agares said and whistled. He seemed pleased with himself. “I bet that smarted to say. I know you, remember; I tasted you. You hate to rely on anyone for anything, ever. It’s cost you, too. Jobs, friends, lovers. You’ve built a nice little fortress, haven’t you? You really want to know what’s going on?”

  “Yes.”

  “At first your mind will deny it. Then you’ll think I’m crazy, and then you’ll think you’ve gone crazy, but then you’ll see it, see the blurry edges of it, see the shitty wallpaper and choke on the cheap air freshener, and you’ll wish for the rest of your life you hadn’t asked, hadn’t seen it. You ready for that?”

  Sunny didn’t understand why, but she was scared. Agares nodded, keeping his eyes on the road and the growing city. There was a sharp screech somewhere beyond the cab. The hawk drifted ahead of the truck, gliding deeper toward the canyons of concrete, steel, and light. They followed.

  “Let’s just dip a toe into the water,” he continued, “not too deep. Suppose I told you there was no omniscient, omnipotent entity that created the universe, no Heaven or Hell, no afterlife.”

  “No shit,” Sunny said, reaching over and taking the old man’s cigarettes again. “That’s the big mind-blowing revelation? Anyone who’s lived in this shit hole of a world for a while knows that. No Super Santa, no reward for being a good girl and sure as fuck no punishment for the bad by the cosmic cops.”

  The old man laughed. It was an ugly, unnerving rasp. “You know, I’m betting you for one of the ones who goes crazy when you get it.” He lit the cigarette that dangled between her lips. “There is a divinity in this place,” he said, keeping the flame of the black
lighter shivering before her eyes. “It’s in you and all the rest of your kind, a tiny spark of the infinite, a seed of God. Saints got it, serial killers too. Cops, criminals, all of y’all got it, and regardless of what you may think, you can’t lose it, can’t sell it, either. Harder to get rid of than dog shit on your shoes.”

  Agares flipped the Zippo shut with a hollow clank, and the flame was snuffed out. Sunny took a pull on the cigarette and shook her head. “Sounds like you’re talking about a soul. I don’t believe in that shit, either. Even if such a thing existed, what the hell has it ever done for me, for you?”

  “Hey, don’t drag me into your fucking existential tea party. I never said shit about being part of your fucked up species. I got no use for a soul, myself. Just get in the way of getting things done quick, y’ask me.” Sunny gave him a sideways glare. “Not that you did,” he added. “No one ever fucking asks me… until it’s too late to make a difference.”

  The sun had lost its battle; night swallowed it whole. The city stretched all around them now, and Sunny realized that this was the first traffic she had seen on the road since they had begun in the Everglades. A lion-headed biker sped past the old truck; wings of flame mantled his back. By the time she saw the rider cross in front of them, he looked like a burly man with a gray mane and beard.

  “He’s here?” she asked. “I looked all over Miami for him for decades.”

  “Not the places I’d look,” Agares said. “I know a guy who can get us a little closer to him.”

  “How do you know all that? You don’t have a cell. You haven’t talked to anyone since we took off.”