The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  “A little bird told me,” he said. “Hopefully, the asshole we’re headed to will be talkative when we find him. We’re in his domain now, so we need to watch our asses.”

  They got off 441 at 17th Street and headed east. The streets were choked with cars and people, despite the hour. Afterhours bars, clubs, third shift. Everyone was always going somewhere in this city or running from something. The beach never really closed. She welcomed a return to something that felt normal, though she still saw flashes of nightmares and miracles camouflaged in the mundane.

  “You grew up in Little Havana, right?” Sunny started to ask how he knew that and then she felt her fingertip throb where he had sucked her blood. “We’re headed into Overtown. Keep your eyes open and stay close.”

  The pickup pulled up across the street from Town Park. They got out and the old man slid around the traffic, like smoke, headed for the park. Cars, throbbing with music and bass, drifted down 17th, cruising like steel sharks with ground effects lights. Sunny followed, dodging traffic and catching “DNA” by Kendrick Lamar spilling out the windows of a passing car. She found the pistol in her bag and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

  The park at night was washed out and faded in the stolen light of the moon, the land of Faerie littered with crushed red Solo cups, plastic bags drifting like jellyfish, and discarded condom wrappers. She felt something crunch under her high tops and saw it was an empty plastic meth vial. There were more of them scattered among the jungle gyms, the water fountains, the graffiti-covered benches.

  “Jesus,” she said, her hand in her pocket, cradling the .38. “I thought they cleaned this place up?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Agares said. “Places, things, hold an energy, a resonance, from the events, the people, that mark them. Shit leaks over.”

  “You saying City Park is haunted?” There was no skepticism in her voice now.

  The old man grunted. “From your point of view, more like cursed.”

  Agares approached a figure in a hoodie who was slumped on the swing set. The park’s one functioning street light pinned the man, and Sunny could see his hands were an unhealthy pale color and blotchy with sores and scabs. As the two pilgrims entered the circle of harsh, shuddering, sodium light, she sensed the presence of other figures gathering around them, behind them, in the darkness. She slipped the gun free of her pocket, her hands shaking, and held it close to her leg.

  “Hey, Meth,” the old man said to the shadow on the swing. “Long fucking time, huh? How’s biz?”

  The man on the swing looked up and slipped back the hood on his black, zippered jacket. His skin had the discolored pallor of a grub. Scabs and scars covered his face. His eyeballs were yellowed, and when he smiled, his remaining teeth and recessed gums were gray and rotting. For one horrible instant, Sunny swore his teeth had been replaced with endless rows of gleaming hypodermic needles.

  “That you, Agares?” The corpse-man’s voice was a hiss strained through broken glass. “What you doing in the big city, swamp rat? Ain’t safe for you out of your muddy hole, you know that, grandpa.”

  “Sunny,” Agares said gesturing toward her, “Meth-istopheles.”

  He pointed to the man on the swing. “Meth, Sunny. We’re here to do a bit of business, that’s all. I’m on a hunt. The prey tarried in your garden for a time. I’m just wanting to narrow my focus. Simple, see?”

  “Uh-huh,” Meth-istopheles said. “You just wander on in to my territory, ask me to help you claim a skim it sounds like I have a pretty good claim on myself, and then wave goodbye like a happy, happy asshole while you and—Sunny, was it?—drive off. That’s no business, gator-fucker, that’s a motherfucking insult.”

  Meth stood. It reminded Sunny of a zombie lurching to life in a horror movie. The others just outside the circle of dingy light shuffled closer. She almost brought up the pistol, but Agares raised a palm to stop her. His own hand fell to the hilt of his Bowie knife. He walked forward until he and Meth were only inches apart.

  “You aren’t still pissed about the whole business with the German, are you?” the old man said. “We both got good and fat off that one, old buddy. You have no fucking right to…”

  “You have never honored the law of domain,” Meth snarled. His anger was the first sign Sunny had seen that he might perhaps be human. “You and your fucking hawks wander wherever you please and stick your big beaks into matters that are none of your concern.”

  “My domain is the lost,” Agares said. He spit on Meth’s expensive-looking sneakers and grinned. The expression was a joyless thing, a wolf bearing fangs. “She’s bound herself to me, and we’re seeking a man she wants to kill. His essence-scent led to you. Now you can give him up, or I can kick your scabby ass all over your playground, Meth, and then you give him up. Make the smart choice.”

  Meth’s response was to draw a small pistol from the pocket of his hoodie. “Kill her,” was all he said, his voice shrill as he leveled the gun at the old man. Agares’s hand flashed up, the big knife’s blade bright in the counterfeit light. Sunny heard the faint thudding of sneakers and saw the circle closing on her. The first to reach her had a box-cutter in his hand. He cocked his arm to cut her, and she pulled the trigger, her hands shaking from fear and adrenaline. The hooded shape jerked and fell. A second shape was on her, then a third. A scabby hand grabbed her shoulder from behind. She screamed, firing again and again, spinning wildly.

  Meth’s gun blew a ragged hole in the old man’s shoulder as Agares’s arm shot out, like a snake striking, to slice Meth’s throat. A crimson curtain of blood spilled from the nicked carotid, and the cadaverous drug dealer staggered backward. Agares tossed the knife to his non-injured arm as the bleeding one fell to his side. He snarled and dove at Meth, who was trying to dam his spurting neck while firing again. The shot missed and Agares sunk the knife deep into the dealer’s side. They both fell to the ground in a tangle.

  Sunny stopped shooting. She felt somehow distanced from her body. She had lost count of the shots when the fear devoured her reason. No one was trying to touch her, hurt her anymore. Three corpses were cooling in the playground dirt. Her whole body shivered as she reconnected with it, and her ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton. Dark shapes darted and fled the park, startled birds scattering. Sunny looked over toward the swings to see Meth-istopheles lying still on the ground, his chest wet and black with blood. The old man crouched on top of him. His knife was sticking upright in the sandy soil near Meth’s still-smoking pistol, cradled in a severed hand. Agares’s arm was bleeding, but the old man used his good arm to lean in near the dead drug dealer’s face.

  “Come on,” Agares said, “come on… give it up, give it up, come on…” He pulled the corpse’s mouth open. Sunny walked slowly toward them.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “We have to go. I… I killed these people. The police…”

  “Police will be here in about 10 minutes. To take pictures, file reports, and clean up the mess. I still need answers from this jackoff.”

  “He’s dead,” she said, still feeling like she was dream-walking. “And you’re bleeding pretty bad.”

  “Yep.” The old man stared intently at Meth’s gaping mouth. “Liable to pass out pretty soon, but not until… here we go.”

  She watched as a small object floated out of the dead man’s mouth and hovered a few inches above Meth-istopheles’s face and slowly, silently, rotated. It was an octahedron, made of something that resembled black, mirrored glass. Blood dripped from the object, staining Meth’s pale face.

  “Yeah,” Agares said, almost purring, “give it up like a virgin on prom night, yes.” He reached out with his good arm and clutched the object in his fist. “Not getting away that easy, asshole. I told you to do it easy but no. Everybody’s gotta be a fucking gangsta. Dumbass.”

  “What the fuck is that thing?” she asked, helping Agares to his feet. His clenched fist jerked and moved as if the eight-sided object was struggling to get free.


  “It’s the Colonel’s secret recipe,” Agares said and laughed harshly. Several cars had stopped to watch what was going on in the park, locals holding out camera phones, shouting to one another. Sunny thought she heard sirens in the distance. The old man stumbled a little and paused as they headed to the truck.

  “Shit,” he said. “Yeah, I’m going to pass out. Here, hang on to the little fucker. Don’t let him get away.” He handed her the bloody little octahedron and she clutched it tightly. It was trying to move, to slip free. She stuffed it in her pocket and tamped it down with the still-warm .38 and then helped Agares reach the truck, sliding him into the passenger seat.

  “It’s your town,” the old man said, his eyes closing, “find us a safe place to flop.” Then he was out.

  “Maldito idiota,” Sunny muttered under her breath. She found the keys to the truck still in the ignition, the large alligator tooth dangling from the keychain. She started the truck and sped into the evening traffic.

  ***

  Agares woke on the couch, his hat and jacket gone, his arm bandaged. He tested the wounded arm, grunting in pain. It had to hurt like hell, but it still seemed to work. His boots were off and beside the couch, and he groaned as he sat up. Sunny was watching him across the room wearing a pair of pajama pants and a sports bra. She had the .38 leveled at him.

  “Where is this?” he asked.

  “My place,” she said, enjoying the look of shock on his face. “It was close. You were bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  “Why the gun?”

  “Because I have no idea what you are, or what this thing is.” She nodded curtly toward a sealed mason jar. The black, shiny octahedron hovered and spun inside. “Or what is really going on. You gave me some lame bullshit about the soul being immortal and indestructible, and that doesn’t cut it. I thought maybe you drugged me back in the ‘glades, but I know better. I’ve been high, been drugged; this is more like a lucid dream. And now, because of you, I’ve committed murder, so you’re going to explain all this to me, or I’m going to shoot you.”

  “Yeah, I can see it,” he said. “You got a taste for it now. That’s good. You’ll need it for your old man.”

  “What? What the fuck do you know about it, you hustling bastard?” She aimed the gun at his face, stabilizing the pistol by using both hands on the butt.

  “Not as much as I did know,” he said. “When I lost that blood, I lost some of my tie to you too. Explain it to me. Why are we going to kill your father?”

  The words, said out loud, hit Sunny like a punch. She lowered the gun a little. “Like I said. He ruined my life, ruined everything.”

  “How? Tell me.”

  “He was born in Cuba,” she said. “He came over in 1980 with some of his buddies, looking for work. Castro and Carter stopped people from coming before he could get settled and get his mom, my grandma, Benita, over. She died a few years later. He got a job doing construction for one of our relatives who came over to the U.S. in the late fifties, and his sister, my Aunt Lira—she was really pretty—she got a job as a waitress.” Sunny paused for a moment, the memories swimming in front of her, picking through thorns to find the few sweet ones. “Papi, he always said I looked like her.” Something painful bit her and she looked back to Agares with the same cold, slate eyes she had come to him with in the swamp. “He said I was his sunshine on a cloudy day, you know, like that stupid song. That’s why they named me Sunny. Bad choice.”

  “Suits you,” Agares said. He sounded sincere.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she replied. “The rest is typical. He met my mom. They had fun. She was in her twenties; he was in his late thirties, and he had a pocketful of cash. He was foreman then, and there was apparently a big boom in the eighties, so it was like a party. The work dried up around the time me and my brother were born. Papi, he didn’t plan to stick around. Good guy, right? But he lost his job, and he needed a place to crash, so he stayed with Mom and ended up raising us kind of by default.”

  “Why didn’t he stay with your aunt?” Agares looked around, found his jacket draped over one arm of the couch, and searched it for his cigarettes but came away with nothing. Sunny tossed the mostly empty pack to him. He slipped one of the remaining ones out and lit it.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s a funny story. See, one of the reasons he had all that fucking money in his pocket was he was doing some side jobs besides construction. He was dealing coke, and he started using. He got Aunt Lira into the business and got her using too. Mom used every now and then, but she stopped when she found out she was going to have me and Mendo. Lira, she couldn’t stop, even when she told Papi and Mom one night when she was high and drunk that she was going to have a baby, Papi’s baby. She never got to have the kid, though. She got cut up in a men’s room over an eight-ball sale that went south. Bled out along with my cousin-brother in her belly.”

  Agares smoked his cigarette and watched her with eyes like a reptile, alien, cold, unknowable, and rapacious. Sunny paused a moment. The pack of cigarettes flew back across the room and dropped in her lap. She selected one of the remaining coffin nails as she continued. “Mom stayed with him even after Lira. She had a taste for the coke by then, and Papi would give her just enough to keep her quiet, let him crash at the apartment, or when he wanted to fuck her… or me. See, there were four of us by this point, and Mom used while she was pregnant with both my younger sisters. It fucked them up. Me and Mendo were the oldest; we were both 12. Did I mention he always told me how much I looked like Lira?” She lit the cigarette with a shaky hand and took a long pull on it, like she was willing more of the smoke deep into her being. She got up, gun in one hand, cigarette in the other. “You want a beer? I think have some rum.”

  She returned with the rum for herself and a cold bottle of La Tropical for Agares. He took it. She joined him on the couch, her knees curled up close to her chest, the gun no longer anywhere to be seen. After a long pull on both the smoke and the bottle, she continued. “He would give me coke, just a bump, to make me less whiny when he came to visit. After a while, I was happy to do what he wanted…” She took another long drink. “Happy,” she said with dead eyes. “Mom didn’t give a shit. She pretty much sold me to him for her own habit. By this time, she was doing rock, spent her own money on that, the money she was supposed to use to feed and clothe us, y’know, pay the rent, stuff like that?

  “Mendo, he didn’t like the idea of his twin sister being a coke whore at 13, so he called the old man out. He had grown about half a foot, put on some muscle. He grabbed Papi when he tried to take me with him. They fought… and Papi… he… he killed Mendo, right there in the apartment. He made me leave with him… made me help him get rid of the body. He… we… chopped him up, fed him to the sharks out on a boat. He told me that if I ever told anyone, if I ever disobeyed him, he’d do my younger sisters like he did me, and then he’d kill them too, make me kill them and…” Her voice caught in her throat for a second, tangled in pain and sadness. It was a wet sound. “He said… he said I was his and he’d see me dead before he’d ever let me go. That we were… family.”

  Agares leaned forward eager to catch every strain of the suffering in her voice. He closed his eyes and sighed. Lost in her pain, Sunny caught herself suddenly when she noticed the almost orgasmic reaction in the old man. Her eyes stayed dry. She took several long swallows off the bottle and composed herself. “So, I did what I was told. Somebody called the cops, but no one said anything, and Papi skated on killing his own son. He joked once that he was sure he had a few other bastards laying around. My sisters got taken away by DSS while the cops were looking into Mendo. They saw what a cesspool our apartment was, the shape Mom was in, and they took them into foster care. They were going to do the same to me, but Papi said he could take me in. He was smart enough that he didn’t have a record, and he looked good on paper so they gave me to him.”

  “How long you with him?” Agares asked.

  “Till I was almost 18. The
… things I did for him…” She finished off the dregs of the bottle. “I ran. Got out of town with some help from his uncle, the guy that had put him to work in construction. After the business went bust, he started doing sales on construction materials, equipment, shit like that. I showed up at his door one day, and he and his wife hid me, cleaned me up. They got me a little money, some help, and I got the hell out of town. I came back about 5 years ago when I heard from a lot of people that Papi had just up and vanished.”

  “So you’ve looked for him for 5 years?” Agares set the empty beer bottle down. Sunny nodded. “Never found him. Why not just get on with your life? Why keep looking?”

  “I fucking tried,” she said. “I tried to forget, tried to build something on top of all that shit. I couldn’t. I tried over and over again. I wrecked lives, hurt people, destroyed friendships, and more. Finally, I knew. I knew if I was ever going to get away from him, ever going to be free of him, I had to find him and kill the son of a bitch.”

  “And that eventually brought you to my door.”

  Sunny nodded again, putting down the empty bottle. “So now you know the why. Now, your turn. Explain to me what I’ve been seeing. What the hell is that thing that came out of your dead friend’s mouth? All these things… explain them to me. No more vague-ass bullshit. Tell me.”

  Agares grunted. “Okay, I think you’re ready now. There is no Heaven, no Hell, nothing beyond this place. Human beings, their immortal souls, have existed here since the world’s—the universe’s—creation.”

  Sunny began to open her mouth to protest, but Agares silenced her with a raised finger. “There is a god, well a god of sorts, small g. He holds dominion over this world, and he is more like a jailer than a creator or shepherd. He doesn’t give a shit about you, any of you. Truth be told, he hates you. He built this universe to contain you, to contain the divinity, the god—big ‘G’— inside all of you.”

  “You expect me to buy any of this horse shit?”