by Jean Rabe
Still no noise.
She was attractive, no matter her years. Her face heart-shaped, cheekbones prominent, nose flared a little, eyebrows high and thin, expertly shaped. Her lips were a fleshy-brown. They’d been red when he first entered the shop; he remembered that. Elijah was good at catching details. She’d been sucking her lower lip under her teeth, rubbing away the shade of lipstick she’d had on. He spotted a fleck of red on a front tooth. Lipstick?
Blood?
What made him think it might be blood?
His knees started to buckle and he reached forward and grabbed the edge of the counter. In that instant sounds rushed at him: her voice, husky and melodic, like a spoken song that he couldn’t understand; a faint police siren; music, a bluesy piece that probably came from the bar; laughter from some dive apartment directly overhead; a car door slamming; someone yelling in Spanish. Cojones, he made out that word. “Estás barracho,” he heard following something shattering upstairs.
Elijah heard his heart, too. It pounded and threatened to ride up into his throat. Was it nerves, or the result of a spell she was working? A handful of weeks ago he would’ve laughed at the notion of magical spells, witches, and the like. But not now … now he knew they existed in the city’s dark heart, hidden and almost impossible for the Average Joe to find.
Expensive to find.
Three thousand by the hour, she’d said.
He’d already dropped thirty grand just getting to this point.
The bar music changed. Something old and gravelly like a Louis Armstrong rip-off. More cars went by. The siren faded. Adiella talked louder, her words sing-song now, and still nothing familiar, though certainly not Spanish. Lady Lakshmi said this woman was the very best.… if only she could be persuaded to help. And apparently he had persuaded her with his promise of money.
Three thousand an hour.
She hadn’t even asked him what he needed. Did she know? Could she see it? He looked down and to his right. Was she just filling time with her mumbo-jumbo to bilk him out of money? Or maybe Lady Lakshmi had told her about the … thing. Maybe traffickers in magic gossiped.
The ceiling creaked. Someone walking overhead, something else shattering—a plate maybe. A second set of footsteps, heavier. A shrill cry, then laughter, a hush, and moments later rhythmic banging; a headboard against a wall, he guessed.
Adiella’s voice grew louder still.
Time passed and the banging overhead stopped. An angry car horn blatted out on the street. He heard shouts from an argument and then the horn barking again, but he didn’t step away or turn his head to glance out the window. Elijah intently watched Adiella.
Her fingers drifted off the page and gestured like a conductor might to an orchestra. Finally the candle flames moved and smoke trailed up from them—diaphanous serpents rising to join the patterns on the painted tin ceiling. She trembled and her face practically glowed with a fine sheen of sweat. He watched her gulp in the fusty air. Her chest heaved.
Another tune came on across the street; he recognized Wynton Marsalis’ Root Groove. Another siren wailed. The couple upstairs giggled and turned on a television.
Adiella coughed and slumped forward, hands splayed across the spread in the book and small body quivering.
Is she all right, he wondered, or is this a part of some elaborate act? He opened his mouth, then thought better and waited quietly.
After a few moments she righted herself and reached to the wall behind her, flicked on the lights and blew out the candles. She closed her eyes and let a silence settle between them. In it he listened to an argument out on the street and what he thought was either a gunshot or a car backfiring. Theme music from an old sitcom trickled down from upstairs.
“You have acquired a demon,” she pronounced.
Elijah pushed away from the counter. “A demon? You know for certain that’s what it is? It’s a demon? A real demon? Fire-and-brimstone from hell?”
“An old demon, a soul beast.” She shook her head, more wisps of white hair coming loose from her scarf. Definitely some age to her. Maybe sixty, shrunken from the decades. Maybe she could appear whatever age she wanted.
“Can you see it? This demon?” He didn’t bother to hide the incredulity in his voice. “Did your … spell … whatever it was you did … let you really see it?”
“See it? The beast is here? In my shop?” Her eyes went wide, a mix of surprise and anger. “You brought a demon into my shop? You dare?”
“Of course it’s in your shop.”
“You dare! You brought it with you?” Her face drew forward into a point. “You dare!” She shouted at him and made the sign of the cross.
“I can’t help but bring it with me! It goes where I go. I could have explained that if you’d—”
She dismissed him with a snarl, closed her eyes, and whispered, rolled her head like she was working out a kink in her neck. Her voice sounded like wind seeping in under a door, a gentle and persistent susurrus that went on at length. When she opened her eyes again her expression was calm, and her voice was even.
“I cannot see the demon, no, Elijah Stone. “Where is it?”
“Right next to me. It’s always right next to me. It’s staring at you.” He pointed to a spot near the briefcase.
“Ah, that is what I feel. I feel its eyes on me.”
“So get rid of it!” Elijah ground his foot against the floorboards. “That’s what I’m paying you three thousand an hour for, right? Get rid of it. That’s what I came here for, what Lady Lakshmi sent me here for. Just get rid of the damn thing.” Please, dear God, get rid of it.
Adiella turned a page in the book and read silently while Elijah continued to fume and worry. She reached below the counter and brought out a second book, and later a third.
A car with a busted muffler clunked by. Another revved its engine. He heard shouts in Spanish, then things settled down and the bar music caught his attention: Kanye West’s Coldest Winter. Appropriate for the weather, he thought. More time passed, and Elijah’s legs grew sore from standing. The couple upstairs turned off the television. He looked at his Rolex: 9:15. Had three hours really passed? No wonder his legs felt like wood and his feet were numb. He needed a restroom.
A fourth book came out, this one about the size of the Shakespeare tome he’d glanced at earlier. She relit the candles, turned off the lights, and started chanting more erratically than before. The animal beads clacked as she twisted this way and that, her shoulders jerking.
“Is it gone?” she asked, finishing undeterminable minutes later. She looked even older to Elijah now, eighty, ninety, brittle and frail like she might break with any breath, like casting the spell had added decades to her small frame.
“No. It’s not gone. It’s still watching you, and it’s babbling in some language I can’t understand. It’s always babbling.” He rubbed the side of his head. “It only shuts up when I’m sleeping.”
“This demon,” she said, squaring her shoulders and again blowing out the candles. She waited a beat before turning the lights on. It looked like a few of those decades had melted from her, and she stood a little taller. She made the sign of the cross once more. “This demon, describe it to me, yes.”
“It’s fuckin’ ugly.”
“In detail, please.”
When Elijah finished his account he crossed his arms. “Shouldn’t you have asked me about this, oh, say nine thousand dollars ago? Tell you what it looks like? Sounds like? It smells, too. In fact—”
“It is not a demon I am familiar with, Elijah Stone.” She tucked the errant hairs back under her scarf. “And I have faced many demons. I have exhausted my magic in an effort to sever this particular beast from you. It should have worked. My magic is strong.”
He would have called her a charlatan, the word churned in his mouth, ready to spring out. But he held his tongue and merely thought it. Rip-off. Fraud. Con artist. He wasn’t about to write her a check. He’d bring out his cell phone, call a cab, mayb
e call the police while he was at it, and—
“It should have worked, but it is a dominant demon that has attached itself to your soul. As I said, old. Very, very old. It defies me. And that it can hide from my sight … its power is great. You say it babbles?”
“Well … it makes noises. I figured it was talking.”
“I hear nothing.”
“I’ve gathered pretty quick that only I can see it, and only I can hear it.”
“But you can’t understand it?”
“Hell no.”
“Powerful,” she repeated.
“Powerful? Horrible is what it is. And it’s caused me nothing but grief. It’s ruined my life, ruined everything. It’s killed. Because of that … that … thing I have no one left in my life. My girlfriend, gone. My mother, sister. It’s never hurt me, just the women in my life I cared about. It’s just me now and that … that … damnable demon.”
“Lakshmi could do nothing, not exorcise it. And I cannot sever it—”
“So why the hell am I here? Why—”
“But unlike Lakshmi, I can save you, perhaps save your soul. I cannot sever it, but—” She waited a moment. “—I can provide a remedy. And it is not such a difficult one, Elijah Stone.”
His bladder threatened to spill over, but he stayed put. “You can’t get rid of it, but you know—”
“—someone who can.”
Great, Elijah thought. Another business card to send him to another hole-in-the-wall and another fakir. More money tossed away. But any amount of money would be worth it if only—
“You came by this demon, Elijah Stone, by stealing it, yes?”
Elijah swallowed hard.
“That is correct, yes? You stole the demon?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know it was a demon. I didn’t see it then. Only after—”
“But you stole it.”
“Sort of.”
“Yes or—”
“Yes, I stole it. Damn it all to hell, I stole it! But how … how did you know that?”
“That is how the demon’s previous socio … marido … compañaro … dueño—” She tried out one word after the next, settling on “—attendant. That is how the previous attendant rid himself of it, had it stolen. My magic told me that much, that greed is probably the trigger to the horrible curse. The covetous pockets of darkness in your soul stirred the demon and attached it to you.” She put the candles and books back under the counter. “That man, the previous attendant, he lured you—perhaps not intending you specifically, but lured someone, you—to steal the demon. He must have divined the nature of his curse … and the remedy. You solved his ugly problem by willingly … eagerly, in fact … taking it on yourself. It is how the curse and the beast pass from one to the next. Greed, desire, ambition, those dark pockets, all of those things wrapped in the trigger. The demon cannot be given away.”
“Curse.” Elijah’s jaw clenched. “I am cursed. I stole the briefcase,” he admitted.
“Thou shalt not steal,” she whispered in her wind-under-the-door voice.
“Two months ago I took it.”
“Thinking you had stolen some great corporate secret. That is what you do, yes? Steal secrets from one company and sell them to another?”
Elijah didn’t answer.
“It was a secret you stole, but not what you were looking for.”
“The briefcase was filled with useless paper. It looked interesting, important at first glance. Looked like what I was after, so I took the case. But I got it home and went through it and found it incomplete, useless.”
“And—” she prompted.
His story came out. “I tried to throw it away, but the briefcase reappeared in my office an hour later. The creature showed up with it. I tried to burn the briefcase, but it won’t burn. Run over it with a car, it’s unscathed. Throw it in the river, and it comes back. I left the briefcase at work, and the damn thing was at home waiting for me, along with the—” He searched for the word and spit it out like a piece of rotten meat. “—demon. I left the briefcase at a park bench, but it appeared in my hand when I called for a cab. I left it behind in the cab, but that didn’t work either. I can’t lose it, and, you’re right, I can’t give it away. I’ve been daring people to mug me. Subways, bus stops, in front of your shop. I wanted someone to steal the damn briefcase just like I’d stolen it. So it seems without any spell or old musty book I’d already hit on the way to get rid of it. The demon is clearly attached to the briefcase. Except no one wants to steal the damn briefcase. My money. My coat. My shoes. Italian hand-stitched, they pried off my feet. They’ll take those things. Not the briefcase. Never ever the briefcase.”
“That briefcase, Elijah Stone, it looks like something you’d get at Goodwill. Who would want to steal that? And it stinks.”
The briefcase did have a rather foul odor to it, Elijah admitted, like banana peels that had blackened in the trash. But the demon itself smelled worse.
“I don’t know why I’m the only one who can see it. Only fucked up me.” Tears welled in Elijah’s eyes. He had taken the briefcase because of what he thought was inside.… what was supposed to be inside, what he was going to be paid an ungodly sum of money for. “It’s driving me mad.”
“I know someone who will steal it from you, Elijah Stone. I know an individual who will unwittingly take your soul beast and your curse and thereby save you.”
“You do? How? When?”
“Your address,” she said. “I will need that.”
He fumbled in his wallet and pulled out one of his business cards, smoothing a crinkle in it, and turning it over, retrieving a pen and scrawling an address. “That’s where I live.”
“Eighty-Fifth and West End. Expensive.” She took the card and placed it in a little box next to the cash register.
“How much will all of this—”
She glanced at a clock above the Frisbeetarianism poster. “You owe me twenty-seven thousand, five hundred—”
“Wait a minute, I thought you said three thousand an hour—”
“I thought you did not care what it costs.”
Had she read his mind?
“It will take time,” she said, “for me to contact this thief. I have included that in my bill.”
He pulled out his checkbook and willed his bladder to keep holding. He laid the checkbook on the counter and started writing.
“I prefer a bank check, Elijah Stone. Or cash.”
“It won’t bounce. My word.”
“On your soul, it will not bounce, yes.” Her voice had an edge to it. “On your soul which hovers on the brink of damnation because a demon accompanies you.”
“And this thief—”
“Is very good.”
“I’d have to be in my place when he comes. Because wherever I go, the damned thing goes with me. I’d have to be there and—”
“The thief will come when you’re sleeping.”
“I sleep like a rock. That’s the only time I’m free of the damn demon. Maybe I won’t hear him. You said he’s good.”
“The thief is very good.” She examined the check and placed it under the drawer in her cash register. “Now to the matter of the bait.”
“Bait?”
“The cuota, so to speak. You will have to put something valuable inside your Goodwill case,” she said. “Lure the thief just as you were lured with that promise of a corporate secret.”
“I’ve been doing that, filling it thick and trying to get a mugger to—”
“Your efforts all failed, obviously. You’ve not been targeting the right thief. Nor have you been using the right bait.”
“What will I need? Money? How much money? And how will you—”
“Nothing mundane, but something valuable. One hundred minimum, I would recommend.”
Elijah knew the unspoken word was thousand. One hundred thousand dollars.
“Two hundred. Three hundred if you can afford it. Truly, much more to be safe. Something v
ery, very old and worth a great deal. The thief I will send your way likes very old things, antiquities. Things that are singular, one of a kind. It should be ancient.”
“An antique.”
She laughed. “Ancient, I say. Babylonian, Assyrian.”
“Babylonian?”
“Egyptian, Persian, Osirian, even Mayan or Aztec or from an Ugir tribe … that is if you really want to be rid of your demon. Ancient, I said.”
“A relic. You’re talking about a relic. Museum pieces.”
“To be certain the thief takes your bait.”
“A relic would be costly. Sotheby’s,” Elijah said more to himself. “Something from Sotheby’s maybe. Christie’s—”
“Perhaps something instead from a place less reputable, something from one of the darker markets. Something more … interesting.”
Black market, he mouthed. “I have other sources. I can get something. Ancient, huh? I’ll find something so old and so incredibly valuable this thief can’t resist.” I don’t care what it costs me. Anything! Everything! I’d give up everything!
“Something that will fit in that briefcase.”
“Of course. Something valuable. Who is this thief—”
“Not your concern.”
Elijah stared at a spot next to him. Was the demon smiling? It was so very hard to read its expressions. “What’s to keep him from just taking the contents, leaving the damnable briefcase behind? What guarantee do I have that—”
“Elijah Stone, just as you took the Goodwill briefcase because you thought something important was inside, this thief will take your briefcase. Then it will be … what is the expression? Yes, the demon will be the thief’s cross to bear.”
“I almost feel bad about this, giving the demon to someone else.”
“Thieves, Elijah Stone, deserve damnation.”
Elijah picked up the briefcase, the handle slippery in his sweaty palm. He noted that the demon squatted next to it, babbling and dripping.
“Buy something soon, yes. And something extra, something for me to use in the luring, a sweet treat to catch the mark’s attention. I will need that, a seeding. Then call me to confirm that you have the necessary bait.”