His hand shot out again, faster than her, grabbing her braid and jerking her back like a marionette. Her scalp blazed as he tugged, the shock of it releasing the constriction of her throat. Her cries shrilled through quiet suburbia.
“Shut up, bitch!”
Still pulling her by her hair, the man flung her towards his car, ending her scream as a staccato yowl of pain. Lexi’s hands rose instinctively before her body slammed against the car door. In the seconds she had to steady herself, she saw the man’s form reflected behind her. Then he grabbed her arms, dragging her towards the back of the car, towards the trunk.
It all happened so quickly.
He nearly tucked her into the trunk twice as she kicked and clawed her way out each time, surging to escape beyond his grasp. On her back, half in and half out of the trunk, she struck lucky again, her foot colliding with his chin, earning a guttural snarl and a slap across the face that had her seeing stars. He fumbled to push her legs in along with the rest of her. A dog began to bark madly, finally; the man glanced up and in that house’s direction, his wild stare indicating that he hadn’t thought this girl would put up such a fight, that she’d be easier prey, and that he didn’t want trouble from the neighborhood.
Lexi knew it was her last chance.
She rose to her knees in the still-open trunk and thrust out her hand, touching his face as if to caress it, her thumb plunging into his left eye as he turned back to look at her. It felt like stabbing through spongy cheese.
The man’s howls of agony followed Lexi long after the adrenaline had catapulted her out of the trunk and onto the street, down the road and up the long asphalt driveway of her home. Her backpack had dropped in the scuffle, her hair had come loose from its braid, she was missing one shoe, and there was blood on her face from her attacker’s nails. She looked back, just once, before bursting through her home’s unlocked front door.
The car had vanished. The horned man, too.
. . .
Her pappou—her grandfather—thought Lexi would be safe in church and Lexi tried to believe him. The priest’s voice filled her ears, a droning of ancient Greek that was supposed to lull her into a sense of security. Peace was a fleeting feeling, one there and then suddenly gone, like a dove shattered to pieces during a magician’s disappearing act. She’d told her family about the attack, who’d told the police, who’d sent out a warrant for the man’s arrest based on the description she’d given them. They asked her about his height, his size, his skin and hair color. She told them everything she remembered.
Except for the horns.
Lexi’s parents had never been adamant churchgoers. Yet when Pappou took his eldest granddaughter with him that Sunday, they expressed no dissent. Lexi didn’t remember stepping foot in a church, though she knew she had at least once, when she’d been baptized as a baby. Seated next to her grandfather, she knew no one could easily touch her. A handful of days ago, that fact would have been backed by belief. There was no conviction now; in its chill absence, Lexi cast furtive glances around her. She knew nearly all the faces glancing back at her. Some of them knew of her story; she could tell by the way their brows crinkled with concern or their eyes widened in curiosity. Child hero, some of them whispered behind her back. Reckless girl, she’d heard others say as they crossed themselves and pulled their own children closer.
None of them were the horned man.
To distract herself, Lexi picked up one of the books on the ledge of their pew. It was the thickest one, THE NEW TESTAMENT printed in bold black letters across the yellow cover. Her fingers riffled through pages that were soft and tawny and fragrantly musty. She was intrigued by the surreal sketches that accompanied the text, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. One page caught her attention: a sketch that depicted a desert where a horned creature crouched next to a bearded young man.
From the stories Pappou had told her, Lexi knew the Devil had tempted Jesus in the desert. But it’d all been theory. She’d never been interested in how the Devil looked, her apathy camouflaging her fear. To study him would mean to acknowledge him. The sketch in this book showed a man-shaped being, naked and dark-skinned, two curved horns emerging from his brow, leathery wings protruding from his back. She wasn’t quite sure it was a he, in fact. Lexi had heard that the Devil had taken on the form of a snake in Eden. It had many faces.
Maybe Lexi had never paid attention because the Devil had never seemed interested in her before. The horned people she’d met—those she’d known to be horned, at least, having glimpsed their reflection—had always gone about their own business after interacting with her. They hadn’t bothered her; she hadn’t thought badly of them in turn. They were people, too, after all. Weren’t they?
And how many were they, anyway? Or was it one creature wearing many faces, many skins, entering many bodies? Something like a hydra with many monstrous heads? Perhaps it was easier to make sense of it as just one creature—perhaps that’s why religion simplified it thus. Whatever it was and however many they were, it had tried to abduct her, to whatever end. It had only been minutes—seconds, maybe—but she’d seen its reflection as the man had pressed her against the tinted windows of his car, those dark spiraling horns like those of antelope she’d seen in a documentary on TV. If it was just one creature—the same creature—she’d seen it other times, too, wearing other forms. She’d met it often. She’d never before associated its horns with evil because it had never before tried to hurt her.
But now it had.
The book fell from Lexi’s hands and clattered to the floor just as the service concluded and the majority of the congregation noisily stood up for the final prayer. Lexi remained transfixed in her seat, eyes tightly shut. Those around her assumed she was praying.
She let them think so.
2 / Lexi
“Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.”
–Salvador Dali
After October’s incident, Lexi had developed a habit of working at El Greco with her eyes closed. She did this to preserve her sanity.
The glass-blowing studio was the brainchild of Gabriel, a Greek immigrant who had fled to America after WWII. What began as a one-man hobby grew to become a family business, soon attracting a team of talented glassblowers and artisans. Gabriel and his only son Elias chose to keep the business small, but El Greco’s reputation had spread. Nestled in the heart of central Virginia’s rolling hills, it was pristinely located: two hours southwest from the nation’s capital and an hour’s drive from Lexi’s hometown of South Astoria. El Greco soon became one of Sycamore County’s top tourist attractions.
Gabriel introduced his granddaughters to the factory once they could handle glass without hurting themselves—first Lexi and then, years later, Sophia. The working crew watched over them, keeping the children away from the furnaces, the chemicals, and the sharpest of the tools. The girls learned to play with iron and fire, their cuts and burns teaching them respect and patience. Twelve-year-old Lexi burnt off half her hair. Two-year-old Sophia’s feet had been studded with stitches from stepping on broken glass.
The hot box of El Greco was a cruel playground.
When their mother forbade them to set foot in the factory until they’d grown older, Sophia didn’t need to be told twice. She preferred Barbie over blowpipes anyway. She complained that the noises and odors of El Greco upset her—the charred wood, the wet newspapers, the waxy heat.
But these were the very things that lured Lexi. Beeswax, with its subtle undertones of smoke and honey. The smell of ink on wet paper, the sickly-sweet smell of decay. The sweat of clean bodies, the scent of burnt gloves. She loved the crackle of the fire and the clang of the tools. She loved the magic of sweat-streaked alchemists who blew down metal pipes and created bubbles within molten glass. She loved the flawless final chapter, the glistening undulations as smooth as ice.
She enjoyed disobeying her mother in this.
Lexi began at the cold end, inspecting blown glass for imp
erfections. Over time, she learned to wield blowpipes and graphite paddles and molds. As an apprentice, she handled the cauldrons and worked the furnaces. She was taught the ingredients and the formulas. With her father’s talent and her mother’s stubbornness, she won the adults’ respect. The chill of the glass and the crackle of the fire were languages she could fathom and echo.
Things fell apart when she started Seeing again.
. . .
The factory was a vast room, doubling as studio and worksite. The furnaces protruded from one wall, with tables and tools nearby. Running parallel along the other end of the building, glass-paned wooden shelves displayed the bowls, lamps, ornaments, jewelry, and figurines. Behind these shelves were a couple more tables used as workspaces to paint or groze glass. In the center of the walls that ran perpendicular to the furnaces and the shelves, two heavy doors faced each other. These were often rolled all the way up to let in light and ventilate the building. Beyond these doors swelled Virginia’s grassy hills, patterned with wooden slip-board fences and groves of elm, redbud, hickory, and pine.
The ceiling was the building’s crowning glory. Three wide stained glass skylights slit the wooden rafters of the roof, flooding the floor with kaleidoscopes of color. In the space between the skylights, Gabriel—Pappou to Lexi—had nailed mirrors to the ceiling along the rafters; he was a mirror-maker, too, though he did not often practice this craft. Given their place, Lexi began to draw some comfort that those mirrors were the easiest to overlook.
The exhibitions, on the other hand, granted her no mercy. As a naturally talkative and vivacious child, Lexi didn’t mind being the center of attention when locals or tourists came to admire El Greco’s work. For several years, she’d been a happy exhibitor. The October of her fourteenth year changed things. She would hold up a glass rondel, beaming as her audience gushed over the colors and curves, and then she’d see the crowd’s reflection in the glass. Something would terrify her; the rondel would slip from her fingers. The show tended to end in an eruption of glass shards that upset the team and frightened the customers.
If it wasn’t for Pappou, Lexi would have never stepped foot back into El Greco. Elias lost his temper during an embarrassing exhibition one afternoon. He screamed at his daughter for her clumsiness, piling insult onto injury. Gabriel found Lexi crying in the basement office of the studio.
“Tsoupi mou,” he said. He sometimes called her this, a term of endearment used by an older generation of Greeks. “Are you hurt?”
Lexi could only shake her head, unable to look at him.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” the old man murmured. He grabbed an office chair tucked between the filing cabinets and sat down across from her. “It was merely a vase. Your father just overreacted, like any healthy red-blooded Greek.”
“Nobody gets it,” Lexi gasped through her tears. She wiped her face with scraps of wet newspaper. Black ink smudged her cheeks, helping her look as damned as she felt. “He visits me. He’s back.”
“Who is back?”
“The Devil,” she said. “Your exercises don’t work anymore. I can’t un-see him like you. How do you not see him anymore, Pappou? How do you repel his faces?”
Gabriel sat very still. He studied the hollowed cheeks and haunted eyes of the fourteen-year-old girl crouched on the chair across from him. “It’s why you’re breaking things…”
Lexi wrapped her hands around her body and cradled herself. “Why?” she asked, hating that she sounded like a frightened child. “Why is he back?”
“He never left, child.” Her grandfather frowned. “Your defenses simply weakened. How long have you been Seeing?”
“Weeks.” Lexi shuddered. “Since October.”
Gabriel’s frown deepened. “The attack.” He rested his head in his hands in a moment of self-loathing. “I’m sorry, child—I did not realize the enormity of it. I’m a fool. I’d told you to never speak of it again and… you kept your word.”
Lexi remembered her grandfather’s reaction after he’d seen her drawing of a red-haired kindergarten teacher many years ago. “I suppose I should have told you anyway.”
“And I should have guessed. But you did well not to speak of this to others. People fear what they do not understand.”
“That makes sense. I’m afraid of me.”
Gabriel’s heart went out to the eldest daughter of his only child, her longing for normalcy mirroring his own. He raised his head and reached out to touch her hand.
“Make it go away,” she begged again. “Please make it go away.”
“Don’t be afraid, dearest. Where there is darkness, there is light. You forget there are parts that do not peek out as much, especially when you’re not looking for them. You forget the angels.”
“Please,” she whispered.
He promised. He would again train her to protect herself, as he’d taught himself. It was the only way he knew, a methodology like armor, something which could withstand force, yet which could be dislodged. Lexi was older now than she’d been in kindergarten. Her brain functioned with more logic and less emotion. Gabriel knew it would be harder this time.
Now Lexi had to make sense of things before she believed in them.
. . .
It took them three weeks. “It’s a trick,” Pappou reminded her. “A temporary fix. Maintaining your peace takes a lifetime of practice and mindfulness.”
The trick was to change her focus—to look at a speck of dust on the surface of the glass, or to stare through it at the floor or wall—and to genuinely convince herself that it was all there was to see.
“Look on, look through. Not in,” he’d caution. “The glass, not the mirror. Look until you can’t See; then the mirror is safe to view.”
Lexi practiced until she mastered seeing selectively. She still broke things from time to time; she couldn’t always keep her guard up and it was harder when she was tired. She rejoined the artisans at El Greco, never speaking of the things she was learning to un-See, sensing the world didn’t take kindly to madness.
And she worked with her eyes open.
Thanks to Pappou, she found peace—and, through her peace, a rekindling of passion and progress. Two years later, at sixteen years old, she designed the stained glass patterns for South Astoria’s church windows. By the time she received her first university acceptance letter, she had made her first mirror—together with Pappou, one weekend, when the others had called it a day. She’d helped him create it without Seeing a single unnatural thing within its surface. By then, she no longer broke things. By then, she no longer wondered if the inhuman reflections didn’t appear because they didn’t exist or because she simply ignored them, choosing to place no belief in them.
All that mattered was that they were gone.
3 / Seeing
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
–Plato
Erica Deheza lost her job because of an obsessively clean camcorder lens. Had she known this could be the case, she would have ripped up and thrown out every rag, spray bottle, and polishing liquid gunk commercialized towards a target market of cleanomaniac Washingtonian reporters, of which Erica was certainly a part.
Was it ambition that had done her in? The second-generation Puerto Rican typically clawed her way through the melee of journalistic vultures, given five seconds of opportunity to thrust their mics and cameras into the face of a politician or celebrity, snapping up words with the mania of Venus Flytraps. Erica was a resourceful woman, preferring to wield her own camcorder whenever possible. She knew she’d never be able to forgive a colleague for missing essential footage right when she needed it. It was easier to beat herself up instead.
Or maybe it was because she hadn’t given Congressman Daimon her bottle of water when he’d been allegedly “grabbing for it”—though the idiot had punched her camcorder, instead, cracking its lens. He’d later tell America he’d survived a small heart at
tack and that she had just stood there and fumbled with the camcorder. Which was bullshit, of course, because Deheza’s father had died of a heart attack years ago before his daughter’s horrified eyes. She knew the signs and Daimon hadn’t displayed any of them. Still, the congressman’s accusation was enough to cost Erica her job and nearly her life. She’d never know the real reason.
Only Congressman Daimon would.
. . .
Erica had been prowling the halls, camcorder in hand, after emerging from a lesser-known bathroom in the lower level of the building where the pre-election debates were being hosted. And there was Congressman Daimon, a presidential candidate at the top of the polls, emerging from the neighboring men’s bathroom and zipping up his fly, his bodyguards waiting at a respectful distance. She pounced, spouting compliments like a rock-band groupie. Daimon’s face softened beneath the balm of her flattery. He’d waved back his guards and agreed to a two-minute interview.
Erica was good and she knew it.
She didn’t like him. Daimon looked the part, sure, with his custom-tailored suits and straight-creased pants and those raptor-sharp eyes that flickered to every movement. He sounded the part, too, when he wasn’t being a jerk or bigot or jerk-bigot. Unlike his colleagues, he never addressed the actual people around him when being videotaped. He had eyes only for the camera.
That hair, though.
It was as if his campaign bus had flattened a select bit of roadkill and then his hairdresser had plastered it onto his skull with all the love and attention one would give to a puddle of vomit. It was an undefined hue of brown-gray, usually tamed and dulled as if covered in layers of dry shampoo, but it sometimes flapped around of its own accord. Debates and interviews seemed to rouse the roadkill; when voices disturbed it, it raised its undefined snout of an undefined color, adding to its creepiness factor. It provided endless comic relief for the media, with some comedians going as far as to speculate that Congressman Daimon’s hair was a second head disguised as hair, as if the man was more hydra than human. One late-night host even speculated that it was Daimon’s parasitic twin who was forcing him to run for president so the twin would have better healthcare coverage.
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