The Demon of Montreal

by A. Michael Schwarz

  She walked towards downtown, towards the cafés and bars, the shops and strip clubs. It would be a hike, but that’s what she needed. She walked quickly trying not to think about anything. That was the best solution. Empty your mind.

  She thought of Steven anyway and wondered what he’d say about her running out in the middle of the night, alone. She pushed the thought out of her head. No, don’t think, not about Steven, not about anything.

  * * * *

  She expected certain sights, certain sounds and smells when she arrived at the corner of Sainte Catherine and De La Montagne. A dreary, low cloud had moved in. She hadn’t noticed it at the outset of her walk, had she?

  The mist roiled in a yellow soup around the street lamps and encapsulated this section of town. She continued on, her pulse quickening just a bit, a taste of danger whetting on her tongue. Was she wholly safe when she could scarcely see around the next corner? No matter, she could duck into a diner or a pub if it came to that. She swallowed. If it came to that—but doors were closed down here and sign lights dark. She continued, the sound of her own echoing footsteps ringing in the foggy dark. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.

  A deviant thrill grabbed her, not quite fear, not quite excitement, something in-between, fascination perhaps. What was down here? What would happen next? A killer slit her throat? Ah, then she wouldn’t need to do it herself. Then all she’d have to do was play the victim—no postmortem guilt either, if there were such a thing.

  “God, I hope I don’t feel guilty after I die,” she said aloud because it felt good to talk, felt good to say things instead of always thinking them inside her silly, fucked-up head.

  She stood in front of a diner, one she’d hoped she’d be able to grab a cup of coffee at. It was closed. This place was never closed. A surge of that same morbid fascination shot through her, an ‘is-this-for-real’ moment that had an almost sexual appeal.

  Walk on. Closer in, further down Saint Catherine where the bars are smashed in, one atop the other, and where the strip clubs are sure to be open. If worse came to worse she could duck into one of those, grab a beer and…enjoy the show?

  Whatever, just walk.

  She concentrated on the misty air, the cool wetness of the fog. She breathed it in, let it out. Walked. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap…wait. A jolt of adrenaline. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. Those were her footsteps echoing off the buildings and pavement? She looked down for a moment, just a moment, as brief as a sparrow’s breath, then up and eyes forward just as quickly as she dare. No, no. She was wearing tennis shoes, soft-soled tennis shoes!

  Is it still fun now?

  Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. She sped up. So did the tapping. She broke into a light jog. So did the tapping.

  Fuck!

  She squinted ahead trying to penetrate the fog with her eyes. Her heart thudded. Excitement evolved into fear; pure, hot, slit-tongued fear. Up ahead, a light burned. A shop sign, faintly red and yellow, perhaps a beer sign. Yes, go to that spot. The one thing that was open on this fuck-all-bizarre night.

  She sprinted. The tapping grew louder and faster and harder and stronger…and she wanted to ignore it, but couldn’t…not completely. She ran past the store fronts and closed restaurants, towards the light at the end of the block. It flickered.

  “No!” she gasped, a breathless shout. The light went out as if the electric energy had been sucked out of its neon filaments, like air from a vacuum. Blink. And darkness…total darkness.

  She stopped and put her hands on her knees, her breathing labored. A smoker for too long, her lungs burned as if they’d burst, blood from her heart roared in her ears. Her whole body shook, legs wobbled. And the tapping continued.

  Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!

  She had to go somewhere, find somewhere. She looked about, gulping giant breaths of mist-laden air and found, on the next corner, the Christ Church Cathedral.

  Yes. Yes! She began walking, this time out of cadence with the tapping that seemed ever louder, ever more present. Move! She sprinted again, but with fatigued vigor, more of a limp than a run.

  She tried to blot out the footfalls behind her. Tried but failed. Her breath came in wheezes now, a stitch dug in deep on her left side. She felt bile swell in a gag reflex as dry heaves threatened. Sweat doused her body and flooded her forehead. She needed water. She needed rest. She needed…

  The Christ Church Cathedral. Cement steps swelled under foot. Her knee seemed to bend backwards and she tumbled onto the uneven pavement, ribs thudding into stone, palms scraping as if on sand paper. She opened her mouth to scream and let out a long, rattling, phlegm-filled hiss.

  Chapter Four

  The tapping stopped. She listened, strained to hear above her pounding heart and crashing blood inside her veins.

  She lay for some time on the steps of the cathedral unable to move, tears leaking from her eyes and mingling with sweat. She listened to the silence that, for now, comforted. She waited as her body broke down the adrenaline and regulated its functions, breath by breath.

  She picked herself up and winced. She could already feel her left knee swell and putting weight on it was none too smart. She limped up the steps Quasimodo-esque.

  Thank God, the door was unlocked. Inside the air smelled sweet, like oiled wood. The floor creaked underfoot. She let the thick, church door close behind and seal her in. She limped through the center aisle. Soft candles lent their light to the lowest level, but left the ceiling and corners steeped in shadow.

  The place was empty.

  She felt her internal guard go slack. She walked to the front, sat down and gazed at the altar and the crucifix that hovered over it.

  And people think I’m morbid. She leaned back and wondered if God really did exist. Maybe, she thought, for the innocent. But not for me. Not for a suicide-thirsty bitch like me.

  She wanted to say a prayer. It’d been a long time since she’d done that, since she’d been a little girl saying a little girl’s prayer, asking Jesus to take her soul if she should die.

  “Take my soul?” she asked, a near whisper. “Yes, take my soul.” She leaned forward, resting her head on the pew in front of her. For a moment she saw the church peopled on a Sunday morning. In the briefest of instants, she heard the hymns, beautiful in their mournful solemnity.

  She pushed her fists into the pockets of her hoodie where her fingers met with a twisted slip of paper. She brought it out under the candle light and opened her mouth to laugh, and found only the will to cry.

  “Yes,” she said through her tears. “Yes, that’s my fate is it? Blank.” She held the paper that mocked her even now in this Holy House of God.

  “Then take my fucking soul!”

  The aftershock of her screaming rang in her ears. She felt foolish, blasphemous, screaming at a crucifix and knew with certainty Heaven had not been made for her.

  “Oh, God,” she bawled. It seemed months—years of pent up grief and unbridled agony unleashed at that moment, the years she’d been cheated of her sanity.

  “Take my soul,” she whispered in a ragged voice. “If you can find what’s left of it.”

  And then she knew. Knew it like it was part of the fabric of the universe, knew it like she’d always expected it in this precise way. She knew she would die.

  Something flitted in the corner beyond the altar and pews, something like shadows…but not.

  But this place is empty…

  Almost. She froze. Then a sort of suspended motion took control as if hands had grabbed hold of every part of her. She could feel them, these hands, pressing against her arms and thighs, covering her breasts and nipples. They reached between her legs, into her womb and around her neck. She felt them, needy shadows, wrapping around her heart, in her throat and between her eyes on the slippery tip of her brain. It was as if she only lived and breathed at that moment b
ecause the shadow-hands allowed it.

  Yet she could swallow. She could breathe. She could hear those footsteps tapping as something emerged from the corner she had so foolishly mistaken for empty darkness and darkness it did hold…the deepest ever conceived.

  The candle flames guttered, bent at ninety degree angles toward it and vanished.

  Footsteps echoed on the marble floor. Tap-tap…tap-tap…slowly, methodically, patiently. The phantom took form within its swirling darkness as it withdrew from the corner, one tap at a time.

  Abby stared in dry-eyed horror as night fell more thickly around her and became the vestige of an incarnation that sucked in all the light of the world.

  Atop the swirling madness that was a cloak sat a human head, wearing a pair of colorless goggles and something that looked like a top hat.

  Abby’s mind seemed to melt and turn inward on itself. Everything she had ever known, any event that had ever happened, any sensation she had ever experienced, suddenly paled to a vapid husk in the presence of this incarnation. All knowledge became meaningless, all belief tripe.

  Here was something more terrible and wonderful, horrific and fascinating than any dream or nightmare ever conceived of by gods or humans in their most sober or delirious hour.

  Abby breathed in short, staccato gasps, a prayer forming there. Tears streamed down her face. Please, her mind screamed, please…I don’t want to die, not now, not like this!

  The figure moved his hands, flicked his black fingers. Like some clever, well-worked prestidigitation, a blindingly white and totally blank square appeared. A calling card without a name.

  Chapter Five

  Abby felt a sensation of consciousness. A flicker at first, a hint only and then painfully she felt the soreness, the heaviness of her body. She supposed she’d been drugged, but the assumption didn’t fit.

  She opened her eyes, but only to darkness. She touched the hard surface beneath her, grainy, sandy.

  What happened? If only she could remember, place that feeling of overwhelming…dread? Or fascination? If only—the sound of tapping echoed from somewhere in the dark. That was enough.

  Her first instinct commanded panic, but too quickly. She quelled it, her logical mind taking front and center in anticipation of the action that was about to unfold. Fear was relative. Fear meant something was about to happen, it meant she might lose control.

  She had already lost all control. Whatever might happen was happening. There was nothing to fear, only the next moments to face.

  The tapping grew louder, closer and it seemed the darkness thickened until it was palpable. It became an entity that grew and churned and somehow, lived. An edge of it moved over her, like the hem of some great, black curtain, sweeping her into its inner fold where a bubble of blue neon light shone, iridescent.

  A figure stood before her in cobalt shadows, cloak draped about broad shoulders, the rest a sculptured silhouette in masculine form. He removed his top hat. Abby felt the urge to run, to scream. Instead she slid backwards across the floor until she hit with a wall. There she drew her knees to her chest and hugged them.

  “H…how did I get here?” she asked.

  The figure took a moment to consider the question carefully, then, in a calm and almost resigned voice said, “I brought you here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you wanted to die but, when you changed your mind, I had to do something with you.”

  Terror drained away, slowly replaced by a flutter of relief.

  “So I’m dead then?”

  “No,” he said. “You’re not…dead.”

  She exhaled the deep breath she’d been holding and her shoulders slumped languidly.

  So, I didn’t kill myself.

  No, you did not kill yourself.

  “You hear my thoughts?”

  “Yes,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I hear everything one of my Summoners communicates.”

  Abby screwed up her face. “I’m not one of your Summoners…am I?”

  His face hung low and statuesque in the glowing light. His body appeared to be little more than an animated outline, constructed solely from shadow. “You were,” he said with regret.

  An increment of time elapsed wherein Abby studied this figure, not thinking coherently, but instead experiencing detached awe. This being…this demon…did not strike her as inherently evil. She did not feel that her life was endangered, yet she knew how close to death she was, teetering on the precipice of it, as if what she said in the next moments would determine it.

  “Who…what are you?” she asked, finally.

  “What I am is not important. Not now, not ever.”

  His answer struck her as arrogant, a purposeful attempt to keep her guessing. She sat up. “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” he hissed.

  “Then tell me why I’m here!” Her voice echoed hollowly in the empty dark beyond the lit circle.

  His head jerked up, he sucked in a breath. “Because.”

  Abby shook her head. “Because? That’s your answer? Because why, because you want to kill me, you brought me here to finish the job?”

  “I told you. You wanted to kill yourself.”

  Hearing him say it so plainly made her feel the impact of those words. Up until now, it had all been theoretical, a fantasy in her head. Now, it became real. More real than Abby had thought or wanted it to be.

  “So, I’m being punished then? Is that it?”

  He shook his head as if talking to a small child, explaining simple lessons. “You’re here because you were nearly…deleted from the cosmos.”

  Abby considered that statement for a moment longer than she probably should have. “So…?”

  “So, it meant you belonged to me.”

  She tossed her head haughtily, her lips pulled tight in a grimace. “I don’t belong to anyone,” she said. The words rang hollow in the darkness.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “At the moment that’s quite true.”

  “Wait.” There was something in how he’d said it she didn’t like. It made her feel too alone. “What do you mean?”

  He sat down on what Abby guessed was a chair and sighed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t understand.”

  He raised a hand. “People like…you. People on the edge. They come to me, or I to them. I don’t know which. I am only drawn to them in some inexplicable way. It stands you wanted to kill yourself and so the universe answered in kind.”

  She pushed back the sudden urge for hysterics and grabbed at sobriety instead. The universe, she had thought, had disowned her. Now, a budding sentiment said it had been the other way around.

  “By sending you? Why?”

  “So that I might make use of your death,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but what good could my death possibly bring to you?”

  “No,” he said, “not to me. I’m not important in any of this.”

  “Who then?” she asked, disbelief hanging heavy in her mind.

  “The human race, of course.”

  Chapter Six

  Abby walked beside him, garbed in a blanket of fog. He did not touch her and she was thankful for that, for she did not know if she could withstand it. He seemed less of a demon and more of an enigma. Her fear of him, of the moment and proximity of death, had blurred into curiosity.

  Their conversation had gone stale, mainly because, Abby thought, he refused to communicate other than in cryptic puzzles. Finally, he had simply said, “I will show you.”

  So she walked now, to be shown. What she did not know, but she hoped it would explain a little better what he had been attempting to tell her.

  They strolled down deep, hollow tunnels made of block-walled concrete. Some por
tions were round and cramped, others opened up into wide antechambers of rectangular design and vaulted ceilings. The tunnels were dry, which relieved her no end, and the squeaking of rats became obliquely drowned out by the chitinous crunching of insect exoskeletons underfoot.

  It was a fair trade. The tunnels lacked light, naturally, which fascinated because she found it an easy thing to see while inside the curtain of the demon’s darkness. It was as if her eyes had been retrofitted to see the world in neon blue.

  Blacklight, she thought. I’m seeing in blacklight.

  “These sewage tunnels were abandoned many years ago,” he said.

  “Do you live down here?” she asked, her feet crunching.

  “No,” he said. “But something else does.”

  Another puzzle to figure out. She would wait, content to be moving. Content to be living. The vestige of her suicide wish still yoked her mentally, but it seemed as though it had been a long time ago, a silly fantasy. It seems that way now, she thought, because I’m pushing it away and making it that way, but before…before I was serious.

  The demon moved soundlessly aside from his incessant tapping, but it was a sound she could live with, a palatable link to the world of sound and touch, science and reason. She let it goad her along and let her mind drift with the meandering tunnels.

  He stopped. The tapping stopped.

  “Here.”

  They stood at the end of the tunnel system with nothing but a vacant, rough-shod wall before of them. Abby craned her neck, peering into every corner, all about the empty corridor. Finally she blinked. “What?”

  The demon was unresponsive, only standing stoic and waiting. She did likewise, trying not to let her mind fill in the gaps. It did it anyhow, automatically processing the fragmented images of the tunnel into cohesive outlines. Like staring into a pixilated pattern to see the hidden sailboat, her brain snapped the image into sharp focus.