Urban Occult

by Various

  The car returned to the blacktop, toward the jogger.

  He rolled up beside her and lowered his window, slowing to match her pace. “Excuse me, Miss?” he called, wearing his puppy-dog look. It was a work of art, the look; he’d spent hours on it, in the mirror, mastering the fine muscles of his face.

  The woman reached a lazy stop. She followed the voice, and her sun-hardened expression lifted; Richard was handsome.

  He saw this and smiled, both inside and out. “I was wondering if you might give me directions,” he said, making eyes with his new student.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said breathlessly, into the passenger’s-side window.

  He parked illegally, then got out and rounded the hood, unhurried. It was important to appear non-threatening, and he did so, despite his left hand remaining in his jacket. He opened the passenger’s-side door, retrieved the roadmap there, and stepped away without closing up.

  “I’m looking for Marietta Street,” he lied, holding the map intentionally far from the jogger. She leaned in; eyes on the map, and Richard stole a quick look around: no one.

  Silence as he produced a chloroform gag and made the jogger kiss it, hugging her close as to forbid struggle. He continued staring at the map, feigning normality, even as she kicked and squealed.

  She was limp in seconds. Richard pulled her gently into the open car, then left the way he came.

  Richard was again in the stinking hotel room, anonymous in his cheap clothing and Foster Grants. The bruja commanded the table as before, smoking and haggard.

  “You come back,” she said, sounding unsurprised.

  Richard said, “I did.”

  After a long silence, he pulled out a fold of bills and slid it across the table. The bruja accepted it with her free hand.

  “Speak.”

  “I’ve thought about it, the demon… and I believe you.” Richard scratched his nose, though it didn’t itch. The old bitch made him nervous.

  “Si,” she said stolidly. A simple statement.

  “I can feel it, sometimes.”

  “The daemon,” she corrected, a Latina stress on the ‘o.’

  “Day-mone,” Richard said, hating her like he did everyone not in the mirror.

  “So, you can feel it.”

  “Yes, at a certain time,” Richard went on. “It… arrives, makes itself felt, and then kind of…”

  “Feeds.” The bruja toked her cigarette, smoothing the seamed face.

  “Yes,” Richard said, a little eagerly. That was the word for it, feed. “It’ll come and feed, and then I’ll feel… drained, I guess would best describe it.”

  The hag nodded, smoking her cigarette dead. The spent butt joined others in an ashtray advertising the hotel. “Si,” she said, no less resigned. “And when does this happen, the feeding?”

  “At a certain time.”

  “What time?”

  “A certain time.”

  The two stared. Richard’s glasses were useless.

  “Ah, a habit,” the bruja said, chin up and looking down her nose. “It feeds on these energies coaxed by your habit.”

  Richard blinked behind his glasses. He started to lie, but didn’t.

  The bruja tamped a fresh cigarette from a nearby pack. “You are not the first such case,” she said, flicking a plastic lighter. “And now you must know how to fight it, si?” She smiled without smiling.

  “Yes,” Richard said, biting back anger. He could fix this cunt. Fix her good.

  The bruja toked. “The channels, you remember the channels?” Seductive smoke spilled from her.

  Richard did.

  The cigarette went tenderly over the crenelated ashtray. “You must break the channel.” A snapping gesture with both hands, breaking invisible bread.

  “Break the channel,” Richard said, noncommittally.

  “Break it,” the bruja repeated, and reclaimed the active cigarette.

  Richard drummed his fingers. “And how do I go about that?”

  “You know how.”

  Richard didn’t answer. She was right.

  The bruja’s smile was gapped and brown. “See? You know.” Joo-noe.

  He drummed the table more, sublimating other things. “You say you can see it, my demon?”

  The bruja blinked and nodded at the same time, with the weariness of the old.

  Richard leaned forward. “What does it look like, then?” he asked, with an air of challenge.

  Again, that heinous smile. “You know that, too!” she said, and laughed smoke.

  Richard was waiting when the cunt jogger came to, in the homespun jail cell.

  Laid over the shelf bench, the woman stirred groggily then shocked upright. Her arms flailed in a way Richard found amusing, and she managed to rise, moaning. Deer-colored eyes rolled in their sockets, stopping on the unsmiling man sitting feet away, outside the bars.

  Showtime, Richard thought.

  “Huhlo?” she croaked, very hoarse. They were always hoarse. The chloroform, maybe.

  Richard said nothing, observing. His hands were hidden by a small black cloth.

  “Where… ?” she began, then discerned the bars. Her eyes bulged, exchanging with Richard a long, conversant look. He could literally smell her fear, a warm copper musk.

  The woman stood uncertainly, stealing brief looks around and periodically back to Richard. The musk heightened as she realized fully her imprisonment. “Who’re you?” she said finally, a fabulous hatred in her voice.

  Richard stared.

  “Wha’ is this?” she followed up, as though a different question might see answer. She found the empty plastic bucket in the floor, looking at it longer than the other things.

  Richard at last showed life. “School,” he said vacantly, only his jaw moving.

  She pondered the chamber pot. “Let me out of here…” she said quietly, a mere velleity. Then, looking up: “Let me out of here!”

  Richard let the cloth fall from his hands, without perceptible movement on his part. He held a black handgun.

  The woman’s eyes touched the gun and she sunk into a corner, compacted to half-size. “No,” she said many times.

  Richard approached the wall of bars. He aimed without speaking, and the woman was all at once stampeding through the tiny cell, like trapped birds he’d seen. Perfect quiet but for the fleshy thuds.

  Richard, following her with the gun, said, “Stop moving,” and she complied instantly, collapsing onto the bench. She wore the astonishment of one finding themselves in a piano-shaped shadow, eyes wet, although she wasn’t crying.

  Richard pulled the trigger with some ceremony, applying pressure in degrees. The woman squinted and grit her teeth. She made a sound he’d never heard before, then the water squirted playfully over her cheeks. She screamed in terror, and then, ascertaining the projectile, screamed again in outrage. She pawed her face and examined her hands. It looked as if she might say something, but she just screamed a third time.

  Richard squirted her once more, dispassionately pumping his arm, then tossed the gun away and quit the room. The screaming continued as he walked the long halls of his island house.

  Richard sat at the bruja’s table for the third time, twice more than he’d seen himself doing so. He threw more money at her, and the hag made it disappear.

  “Is something you’re not telling me,” he said in greeting.

  The bruja smoked. “Is something you’re not telling me,” she replied, the voice steel. “This habit of yours.” An uncertain column of smoke connected her hand to the ceiling.

  Richard drummed his fingers. “You said break the channel, but it’s¾ “ He hesitated: that stabbing reprimand, the high, the drained afterglow so much like bad sex. Demon. Daemon. “But it’s hard,” he resumed. “I try, and there’s this ¾ this punishment.”

  “Si,” the woman said. Old news.

  “So?”

  Her shoulder moved. “So fight it.”

  Richard sunk to his chair, frustrated. “Bu
t it’s not that simple. It—the demon—it does something, fiddles with my head somehow, my, my wiring. And it hurts.”

  “Si.” A long, insouciant drag.

  Richard suddenly hated her more than ever. It turned him on, in his perverse way. Ignoring this, he said, “Tell me. Help me.” He swallowed, and added “Please.” The word stung his tongue.

  The bruja softened, years leaving her. “Disciplina,” she said. “Discipline.”

  Richard’s eyebrows raised. “Discipline?”

  The bruja nodded. “The first time will be hard, si, for the channel is strong, but best the daemon and the channel weakens, and he with it. Best him twice, and he weakens further, and so on. Is discipline, this. He hates the discipline.” The woman smoked.

  This was not what Richard wanted to hear. He quit the room for the last time, the bruja’s eyes tracking him. Outside, he passed a cardboard box on the balcony. His kick sent it over the railing.

  Again he was there when the jogger awoke, the next day. She slept very soundly despite her perilous bed. As she should’ve; after all, she’d screamed herself raw in the night. Hard work.

  She stirred uneasily, then sprung to life as before, perhaps recalling the nightmare place and her new friend. She stiffened as her eyes met Richard, in his chair. A meal tray stood at his side, a box on it.

  “Mornin’,” he said flatly. The room was dark but for some sun at his back, rendering him faceless.

  The woman made no reply, looking very young.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, almost genial.

  “Jane,” she whispered, and it carried. Richard’s house was very quiet.

  “You go to school.”

  Jane didn’t answer. Her eyes had that glassiness to them.

  “I found you at the school.”

  “Have to pee,” Jane said in that same wee voice.

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  She didn’t understand; then she did. Her face went abruptly terrible. The hate there left Richard warm all over.

  Minutes passed. When it was clear Richard wasn’t going anywhere, Jane faced away, dropped her unsexy shorts, and squatted over the bucket. Richard felt very good.

  They had turned the first corner.

  Afterward, she sat defensively over the bench, fixing her captor with a look that could start fires. “What do you want from me?” she eventually asked.

  “You go to school,” was his reply.

  “Buckner…” she said, as though speaking of the distant past. The college. It was written on her tee-shirt.

  “Not anymore. You’re in a new school now.”

  Jane shook her head, two abbreviated turns like a locked doorknob being tried. “Don’t understand,” she said, waning again.

  Richard reached for the table at his left, the small dovetailed box it held. The box had a red plunger button, a cord snaking out the bottom and into the wall. A crude game-show buzzer. Jane’s eyes scoured it.

  Richard flicked a finger. “Come here.”

  Jane didn’t move. Her lower lip trembled.

  “Come here,” Richard repeated. “Lesson number one.”

  Jane pressed against the wall, knees to her chest as though cold.

  Richard dug in his windbreaker and removed two fruit-and-nut snacks. He held them out and shook, as one would tempt a dog. Jane’s eyes went to the food, the box; back to Richard. Diffidently, she stood to the bars which declared her half of Richard’s childhood bedroom.

  “Grab the bars,” Richard said.

  Jane regarded the bars with sudden dubiety, reclaiming her steps.

  “Grab the bars, come on. They won’t bite.” He again brandished the food. “Raisin nut. Damn good.”

  She shifted anxiously on her feet. She’d been on a fast since arriving at the premises.

  Richard dug in his other jacket pocket, for his ace in the hole: a sealed bottle of water. “Last chance.”

  Jane licked her scream-cracked lips… then grasped two waist-level bars.

  “Thank you.” He depressed the box’s big red button, sending several thousand volts into his student.

  Clicking noises. She shrieked terrifically and recoiled into the corner, at once in turmoil. Her eyes gave Richard the hate he wanted, the lids pulled back as to be invisible. Her left foot twitched. There was an ozone smell.

  Richard set down the box and pressed to the bars, leaning airily. “Lesson number one: trust nothing,” he said, expressionless. He pitched the food with flaccid overhand chops; the water. They pelted her feebly and went to the floor. She didn’t grab for them.

  He walked to the door he’d spent time behind, opened it, and went half into the hall. “You die in two days,” he said over his shoulder.

  The door closed.

  Richard dreamed that night.

  In his dream, he occupies the bedroom that is now a prison, him neither old nor young but just there, a simple receptacle of experience. It is dark; the moonlight cuts spiky shapes down the walls. Odors of loneliness.

  Crowding the corner is the demon that feeds on Richard’s crimes.

  “Richard,” it says through unmoving lips.

  “Day-mone,” Richard’s lips don’t move either.

  It says no more as the two stare. The creature is a gnarled skein of black, distinguished from the dark only by a wet gleam of eyes.

  “What are you?” Richard asks.

  “Teacher.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes.”

  Moonlight dances through the trees, mirrored in the demon’s trackless eyes.

  “Why me?” Richard asks.

  “You provide.”

  “I provide?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Energy.”

  Richard says, “That’s what the witch-lady said,” now in the credulous voice of a child. “Why do you want my energies?”

  The demon replies with a question: “Why do you pluck young women from the street?”

  “Because it makes me feel good.”

  A silence answers.

  He starts to ask more, but the demon stands from the corner, a great twilight mass that eyes cannot describe. It nears Richard and the bed, gliding, and Richard makes no move to get away. An odd peace, now. Safety.

  It stops paternally at bedside. “Provide for me,” it conveys, and a formless hand finds Richard’s face, running a cold digit up his cheek.

  “Provide,” Richard says. He smiles big, no longer so alone.

  Jane stirred the moment he turned the knob, a whip-crack of movement then silence. She was learning, this one.

  He found her huddled on the bench, with that broken gaze of hers. Frightened, exhausted; but composed. She had not been crying.

  “Mornin’,” Richard said, and crossed the shadowy room. There was a bulge to his windbreaker.

  “Fuck you.”

  Richard sat, stifling a smile. Yes, learning.

  “Let me go,” she said after a dilate minute, the hate boiling into her words.

  Richard scratched his arm and said “No.” He pulled more snacks from his windbreaker, setting them on his knee. Jane passed one fleeting, clock-tick glance at the tendered food. There had been none since the last two, yesterday.

  “I have questions for you,” Richard said.

  “Go to hell.”

  He continued without pause: “But first, I need you to do something for me.” A reproving look. “Gonna be a good girl?”

  Jane’s mouth worked nervously; it was very dry.

  “Get on the floor and put your arm through the bars,” Richard said, when she didn’t answer.

  Jane processed this, her eyes fluttering. “Why?” she asked, guardedly.

  Richard relieved the windbreaker’s bulge: a fresh bottle of water. It was sweating, very cold, like a picture on a vending machine. “Do it.”

  Slowly, she went on all fours and inched forward, looking up, perhaps for another suspicious box. Her right arm snaked t
hrough the bars.

  “Further.”

  She pressed against the bars.

  “Further.”

  “I can’t,” she barked, with the strain of one holding a great weight.

  “Further.”

  She grunted another inch, her hand starred and shaking, in reach of something not there.

  Richard stood, laying the snacks in his seat. The water went on the floor and he toed it forward, stopping approximately an inch beyond her grasp. He stepped back and looked it over, as if surveying a finished job, then sat back down.

  “Cock-suck­-er!” Jane yelled, and snapped back into the cell.

  Richard restored the snacks to his knee. “Lesson number two: it’s never enough.” He let this settle, then asked, “Hungry?”

  Her eyes flickered to his knee, then away, no longer than before. She rubbed her right shoulder.

  “What did you want to be?” he asked absently. He raised up one of the snacks, feigning study.

  Jane said nothing.

  Richard sighed theatrically. “Hate to have to throw these away. Awful waste.”

  Jane looked at him without raising her head, like a sick animal. “Don’t understand… the question,” she growled.

  “What were you studying for at school?”

  “Engineering,” came her quiet response. It could’ve been the house settling.

  “Engineering.” Richard lowered the snack and flipped it gamely in one hand. “Boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “College boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck him?”

  She hesitated.

  Richard opened the snack and tore a bite off the end. “Mmm, good,” he said through the mouthful.

  She said yes.

  Richard lowered the food, swallowing. “It serious?”

  “Yes.” She spoke evenly, now. Accepting.

  “And you were gonna get married? move into the suburbs? House? Kids?”

  “Yes.”

  Richard nodded, satisfied, then pitched the open snack through the bars. It landed on the bench, beside Jane’s leg; she looked there intensely but made no move for it.

  “Lies,” Richard said mildly, tonguing his teeth. “All that shit. Love, sex, kids. Lies.” He shook his head. “It’s all hormones, mind-games, me, me, me. Not real. All in your head, Jane.” He tapped his left temple.