The Boy Who Could See Demons

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  ‘Is it because you think Ruen actually wrote it?’

  I glance at a car trying to reverse park close to us. It backs so close that its reflection pours across the other’s bonnet. We walk on.

  ‘I wonder if Ruen is Alex’s father?’ I muse.

  ‘A demon?’

  ‘No, I mean, if Alex is actually visiting with his dad. If the physical violence he experienced was at the hands of …’ I stop. The thought that Alex’s father is not dead at all but has been meeting with him on the sly is ludicrous. But I have run out of answers. The music, the attack, the way he asked about my scar the first time we met … And then I think of Ursula. Her urge for me to abandon labels.

  We are at the foot of the botanical gardens now. A woman is jogging with two Dalmatians trotting alongside her. Michael sidesteps behind me so that he is between me and the dogs.

  ‘OK,’ he says, pushing his hands in his pockets and grinning. ‘So let’s consider the possibility. Is Alex seeing demons?’

  I turn to read his face. He is serious. This is a side of Michael I haven’t yet encountered. How could this intelligent, perceptive man even consider that there is such a thing as demons, that there is even the slightest possibility that someone could see them?

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  We are close to the hothouses. Michael takes a step in front of me, tilting his head slightly to draw my attention away from the group of students.

  ‘When I studied for the priesthood I did a lot of research into belief narratives. I read a lot of things by people who claimed they’d seen the unbelievable – angels, demons, God, what have you. People who said they thought they’d seen demons with forked tails, then realised that these tails were links that gradually grew fatter, binding them to the demon, destroying them.’ He pauses. ‘Crazy.’

  ‘What made you so interested in that stuff?’

  He takes his hands out of his pockets and gestures at a seat facing the green lawns of the university. We sit down. He takes a breath and combs his hand through his hair.

  ‘I saw my sister when I was little. My parents have never spoken about her. I only found out she even existed last year. My nan let slip that there’d been complications during my birth because of the other dead baby inside my mother.’ He leans close to me to avoid anyone else overhearing this sensitive conversation. I sense that he is offloading something that has made him feel lonely for a long time.

  ‘I grew up knowing I had a sister named Lisa,’ he continues, ‘because she told me. I knew that she looked just like me, only she was a girl, and that only I could see her. My parents took me to psychologist after psychologist, changed my diet, and then when I was about eight and they were getting really sick of it, my dad threatened to put me through a glass window if I mentioned Lisa again. He said she wasn’t real. One way or another, I stopped seeing her.’ He chews his cheek. ‘But I know she was real. She was.’

  I nod, aware that I am probably the only person he has ever told about this, and I wonder why. I don’t ask – instead, I choose a response that fits within the boundaries of our professional relationship.

  ‘Is that why you studied psychiatry?’

  ‘Sort of. Probably. I just …’ He pauses, clarifying his thoughts. ‘I suppose I needed to understand what the difference was between seeing things of a spiritual nature and having a mental health issue, you know?’

  ‘You needed to explore whether you had a dissociative disorder as a child or were playing with the ghost of your twin.’

  ‘Bingo. And here’s the thing: I’m an atheist with agnostic tendencies.’

  ‘Yet you were going to be a priest?’

  ‘There’s a whole difference between the religious and cultural motivations behind that career path. Few of the guys I met on that route were convinced of the great gig in the sky, ya know?’

  ‘I guess both career paths are about believing in the unseen.’

  ‘I know I saw my sister,’ he says firmly. ‘Mentally ill or not … you say “tomato”, I say “tomayto”.’ He grins, his invisible guard of aloofness returning. ‘I think there’s just some things you can’t explain away by science.’

  ‘You think Alex is really seeing something?’

  ‘Did Hamlet see the ghost of his father?’

  ‘It’s a play, Michael …’

  He looks at me, reaching out to touch my arm. ‘I’m not saying he’s channelling the dead, Anya. There’s got to be a reason why Alex has latched on to such a specific identity. What did Poppy claim to see?’

  I think back to the moment that Poppy had tried to describe what it was like to be her. We were in a restaurant close to the Golden Mile in the centre of Edinburgh, her favourite place for steak. I wanted to break the news to her gently, in an environment where she felt comfortable and happy: she was going to spend two months at the Cherrytree Haven Child and Adolescent Inpatient Facility.

  ‘The doctors say that you’ll have your own room there, Poppy,’ I told her. ‘You’ll be home at weekends. There’s a swimming pool, a park outside, and lots of other kids.’

  I swallowed. Despite training as a child psychiatrist, my professional expertise only got me so far when it was my own twelve-year-old daughter on the receiving end of treatment. The thought of leaving my little girl in a psychiatric unit for two months was heartbreaking, but I had absolutely no reservations that it was in her best interests.

  But she had started to sob. I noticed her grip the sides of the chair, her face turning pale.

  A waitress approached with two plates.

  ‘Who’s got the medium-rare?’

  I looked from the waitress to Poppy. ‘I’m falling, Mum,’ she said, her voice rising to a shriek. ‘Why aren’t you helping me?’

  I should have listened. I should have taken more time to understand …

  People had started to stare. ‘Is everything OK?’ the waitress asked, and I nodded, bundling my wallet and phone into my handbag and searching for a quick way to drag Poppy out of there without too much ruckus.

  ‘You don’t understand what it’s like,’ she’d shouted. ‘What this feels like, Mum! Have you ever even asked what this feels like?’

  No, my love. Tell me now.

  ‘Poppy, it’s time to go home,’ I whispered.

  ‘No.’ Her voice was firm, threatening.

  The waitress stared, the plates in her hands like cymbals.

  ‘Come on, Poppy,’ I said, a little firmer this time.

  And that was when she grabbed a steak knife from the table and plunged it into my face.

  It could have been worse. She told me later she was aiming for my throat.

  *

  I step out of the memory. It takes a moment to untangle myself from its dark hooks. Her absence is a continual ringing in my ears of all the things I should have said to her, all the things I should have done.

  Michael has said something to me. I raise my eyes to his, and he repeats it.

  ‘I said I’m worried that you see Poppy in Alex,’ he says. ‘I know what it’s like when a case hits close to the bone. At times like that you have to be sure you’re keeping the right amount of distance. It’s only human to get involved.’

  Ironically, he says ‘the right amount of distance’ just as he takes a step closer to me, reaching out to touch my arm. I look down at his hand, and he draws it back as if his fingertips have brushed something hot.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, but for some reason my mind is turning to a moment of my past, a memory that strikes me as odd to rise up just then. I am in the kitchen of my Morningside flat, ironing Poppy’s school shirt. Keep your distance, I tell her.

  ‘What did you say before?’ I ask Michael, my voice a whisper. He has stepped back now, unsure of what to do with his hands.

  ‘When? About Alex?’

  ‘When you asked about the reason he claims to see Ruen.’

  He blinks. ‘I said he was channelling the dead.’

  ‘You said he wasn’t channelling
the dead.’

  He looks on, his face full of confusion.

  My darling, I’m sorry. I’m sorry …

  Words I can never tell her now. Unless …

  I smile at Michael and start to walk away. A thought has snagged itself on my heart. A thought that should not have arrived there in the first place.

  What I wouldn’t give to tell you I’m sorry.

  Not a thought.

  A temptation.

  21

  HELL

  Alex

  Dear Diary,

  What do you call a boy with sticky-out ears, a wonky nose and no chin?

  Names.

  I started at my new school on Monday. It’s a bit crap, just like that joke. MacNeice House is like a boarding school in that I have to sleep there and even though my new bedroom is bigger than the one at Mum’s house, I don’t like it. It’s all white and the windows don’t open and someone said the doors are built so that if you try and hang yourself they’ll fall down. I run through all the doorways now just in case they fall over, which makes the other kids laugh.

  My bedroom in the new house will be cool though so I suppose it’s OK in the meantime. Most of the teachers here aren’t very friendly, though I like one of them. She’s called Miss Kells, and she smells like a second-hand bookshop but she seems nice. She’s my personal tutor and she meets with me after school every day in my bedroom for one hour. I get to go to her if I have any problems and we talk about stuff like maths and 2B pencils and Hamlet. Our classes only have ten other kids in them, which is cool because it’s quiet and no one makes fun of me. But nobody talks to each other and some of the other kids are psycho. One of the girls is a year older than me and she says we’re actually in a zoo and that there’s a tiger on the desk and stuff like that. Yesterday she said I couldn’t sit on the seat behind her cos there was a giraffe on it and I looked at Ruen to check there wasn’t and he just rolled his eyes and yawned.

  I’m really glad to have Ruen around because I miss so many things now, not just Mum. I miss waking up in the middle of the night and finding Woof asleep on my head. I miss onions on toast. I miss the way our tap drips all night and sounds like a heartbeat. I miss Auntie Bev and Jojo and the Opera House. I miss the way Mum wiggles her toenails on the footstool when she’s drinking tea and watching Coronation Street. I miss Mum even when she’s sad. I miss our house, even though there are no broken windows in this place and it’s clean and warm.

  I asked Ruen if Mum and I are going to lose the new house since Bev has gone home and there’s no sign of Mum getting out soon, and he said that it was up to Anya now because she’d put me in here and even though Ruen could help me escape, I’d have nowhere else to go. For a moment, I thought, Why don’t I just go home and you can look after me? But then I remembered that Ruen is a demon and he can’t really do normal things, like cook and clean. Which is a pity.

  Though I’m all excited and freaked out and curious about my dad. What was it like getting freed out of Hell? Is he really really happy? Is he grateful? Is he in Heaven or somewhere else? I really don’t understand the afterlife, and when I ask Ruen about it he doesn’t like to talk about it too much, particularly Heaven. He says it is overly conceptualised and idealised and that Hell is pejoratively dismissed and gets bad press.

  Every time I ask about death he looks at me as if I’m stupid.

  ‘It’s the end, dear boy,’ he says, tutting. ‘No more body. No more chocolate cake. There are some advantages, but it depends where you end up.’ And then I ask about where I might ‘end up’ and he starts going on about the idealisation of Heaven and the denigration of Hell.

  Tonight, however, I want to ask him about my dad. I’ve never really found out much about how or why my dad died. I didn’t go to his funeral and Mum has never taken me to his grave, and she has no pictures of him in the house. I’m not to tell anyone about him, she said. Only his name, because it’s also my name. Alex. When I think of whether Dad is happy to be out of Hell I have a memory of me and Dad and Mum having dinner. We were sitting at our table in the living room and Mum brought in some bread rolls on a plate. Dad took two of them out and stuck his fork through one and his knife through the other and started bouncing them up and down the table as if they were feet doing a little dance. I remember the way the sunlight was strong and lit up the side of his face and the lines at the corners of his eyes when he laughed. I remember Mum flicking him with a tea towel, laughing and telling him to stop. She used to laugh loads back then.

  When I think of this it makes me sad, but more confused than sad. I’m confused because when I think of him making the bread rolls dance and then I think of what I saw that day, of Dad shooting those policemen, it just doesn’t make sense. Aren’t evil people evil all the time? Aren’t funny, kind people who bring toy cars for their son funny and kind all the time?

  I was sad for a long time when I learned Dad had died. He just vanished one day, right after what happened at the checkpoint. I never asked Mum if he fell down a mineshaft or got run over or got the disease that Granny had because she was so upset all the time. She just cried and cried one morning and said, ‘Your dad’s gone,’ and I said ‘For how long?’ and she said, ‘For life.’

  And then she went upstairs and didn’t come down, which I thought was weird because I needed her to walk with me to school because I was only five. So I waited for about two hours, then went upstairs, checked the bathroom, then Mum and Dad’s bedroom, and she was in bed. I gave her a push and shouted Wake up! but she didn’t move. So I pulled all the covers off and stomped my feet and clapped my hands and tickled her feet. And then I noticed some boxes under the duvet covers. I knew what they were for because I was with Mum when she picked them up from the doctor’s. All the pills were gone and I felt funny, like scared. Then Mum started coughing and I felt my heart pound because I was glad she made a noise. ‘Have you woke up now?’ I said, but she just leaned across and puked all over my feet.

  I remember I ran downstairs and opened the front door by standing on the piano stool and ran all the way to Granny’s. I told Granny that Mum was sick and there were white boxes in the bed sheets and that I was really hungry. Granny’s face went shocked and her eyes were sad and wide and she told me to go make myself some toast and she made a phonecall, and then she walked quickly with me back to our house but instead of letting me go inside she said, Go to school, go to school. I went to school but I had a knot in my stomach the whole way which got tighter and tighter. And that was the day I first saw Ruen.

  ‘Ruen,’ I say now. I can only say his name when I’m sure that no one is around to hear me, which isn’t very often. He is sitting on my bed and I am sitting on the floor of my room doing maths homework. When he’s the Old Man he is starting to sit more and more, like he’s tired. When he walks he sort of drags his feet and his scowl is becoming so pronounced that it’s like his face is melting. After a few moments he looks up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘So did you get my dad out of Hell yet?’

  He grunts.

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  He grunts again, and then starts to cough. He thumps his chest. ‘Course I did.’

  I sit upright. ‘You did?’ My heart is knocking in my chest and I feel like I need to pee. ‘So what happened? Did you have to, like, break him out of there? Was there a big fight?’

  He coughs once more. ‘Yes, yes, all of that.’

  My mind is racing now. I see Hell in my mind, a red, fiery place with loads of people. There is lots of screaming, and it’s a city, only the city walls are pouring with orange lava and huge blasts of flame keep shooting out of windows, and there are creatures there like the demons I see all the time, only worse: these ones are like zombies with their flesh ripped off and blood pouring down their faces. Dragons are circling in the red sky and there’s big black clouds of smoke there, too. I see Ruen striding towards a big black building with fire pits burning around the front door. There are big mean security guards outside
holding long spears and wearing full body armour. Their helmets have horns sticking up out of the top like a rhino, and their armour is studded with spikes. When Ruen approaches they cross their spears to prevent him from entering. He stares at them, and his eyes are red. He tells them he’s a Harrower. They fall to their knees and tremble before him. He lifts his leg and kicks open the door.

  Inside the building it looks like the biggest cathedral you’ve ever seen, all naked stone and gargoyles and a ceiling so high you almost fall over when you look up at it. There are vile creatures with vampire fangs shrieking and hiding and swiping out at him with their claws, but Ruen calmly proceeds towards the place where he knows my dad is being kept: the room at the top of the tallest tower. He has to duck and dodge past loads of creatures but eventually he gets there, and my dad is so grateful, and when Ruen tells him, ‘Your son sent me,’ Dad cries. And then Ruen fights his way out of there with my dad close behind, only at this point Ruen is starting to sound German and is wearing a leather jacket. Outside is a Harley Davidson motorbike. He and Dad jump on the back and ride off to Heaven.

  ‘Whoa!’ I say to Ruen. ‘That’s just like The Terminator!’

  He looks at me, very confused.

  ‘Wait … did you fight Satan as well?’ I say, standing up. ‘Was he riding a dragon and did giant hailstones of hot coal come falling out of the sky?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Saving my dad!’ I shout.

  I hear footsteps walking quickly down the hall so I lower my voice. ‘Was he really grateful? Did you tell him about me?’

  Ruen looks down as if he’s thinking about it. Eventually he stands and smiles. ‘Your father was released from Hell yesterday, on my command, of course. He was extremely grateful to me and told me he would remain indebted to me for the rest of eternity. In fact, he said he hoped his son – you, Alex – would attempt to pay some of that debt in his stead by remaining faithful to me and assisting in my research.’