The Quarantined City

by James Everington

  “Leianna...” he said imploringly, but his weak voice was drowned out by Gregor shouting the same thing across the café.

  “What?” Leianna snapped at Gregor. “I told you, didn’t I, what this twat did?”

  How does she know that word, that’s Georgia’s word, Fellows thought absently. The other customers have given up even the pretence of not watching what is going on.

  “I think you’d better leave,” Gregor said and at first Fellows felt dreadful because he thought he’d got Leianna sacked on top of everything else. But then he realised Gregor was talking to him.

  ~

  As he walks, Fellows periodically stops to check that A Lack Of Demons is still in the bag of Boursier stories he is carrying, paranoid it will somehow have vanished. The streets of the quarantined city seem still and quiet, as if everything were frozen in place by the blank stare of the sky. The sun seems as pale as the sky around it, but without any wind it is still passably warm, and Fellows decides to sit outside to read. The thought of going home before the story has had a chance to work its magic-trick is intolerable.

  He enters the park by the entrance near the fountain; fortunately it is still too early for any prostitutes to be out. He walks up past the flower beds, and notices that they have been dug up, their fresh brown soil exposed to the sky. Bamboo canes are stood in the soil, atop of which are crudely written signs; evidently the protestors have been here and replaced the civic flowerbeds with seeds for foodstuffs. The scrawled slogans serve to annoy Fellows; they are chastising the unity government for acquiescing with the quarantine but what do they actually expect it to do?

  As he walks through the park he marvels that it is just three days since he was here last, on a summer day that according to the rest of the quarantined city never existed. It is as if he can still feel the warmth of it on his face as he sits down on the same bench, in front of the statue of the city’s founder. He pulls out the story from his bag.

  A Lack Of Demons he thinks; well maybe it is a demon in his home and not a ghost. After all, why would his house be haunted? Whatever the bloody thing is it will be gone soon. Will he even remember it having existed?

  Thinking of its cloudless eyes, he hopes not.

  A Lack Of Demons by Boursier

  “I can help you,” the man in the white suit said.

  Erica turned to look at him, almost doubting the figure in her peripheral vision would prove real, for his words so nearly echoed her own thoughts: help me.

  Help me. Stop him.

  On stage, a beaming young woman was blinking into the flashlights, accepting an over-sized cheque from a representative of the Taschen Foundation. The Foundation’s logo, a stylised wave and seabird, was bright behind them; to one side sat Erica’s husband, Charles Taschen, faintly smiling, beatific. He didn’t rise for the applause that broke out from the crowd, nor the clink of champagne glasses in the toast that followed. Erica didn’t hear what was toasted, but she heard what people said soto voce afterwards. The fashionably wealthy crowd only gave to charity for tax or publicity purposes, and they all thought her husband mad.

  They didn’t know the half to if, Erica thought.

  “I can help you,” the man said again. “Help your husband.” She looked at him more closely: he was all straight lines, dressed in an angular white suit which hadn’t crumpled despite the heat of the room. His tie was a black bar below a square knot; the bones of his gaunt face turned at right angles beneath the skin. When she took his proffered hand Erica expected it to be cold, but it felt hot like brick in the sun.

  “That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but Charles has seen specialists, seen doctors and psychiatrists and behavioural-therapists and god knows who else.” All at her insistence of course; Charles hadn’t believe there was anything wrong with him but he had acceded to her wishes. Meekly, of course. Her voice rose in pitch: “So I’m not sure that you can help.” You’re not getting any of our money, she thought, I might not be able to stop him bloody giving it away but I’ll be damned if another quack is going to take any more before it’s gone.

  “I’m not a doctor,” he said.

  “Oh,” Erica said. She had misunderstood. “Well, if you’d like to make a donation to...”

  “I’m an exorcist,” the man said.

  She almost laughed. Maybe she did laugh, that harsh bitter laugh she’d lately confronted the world with, for several people turned from looking at the stage to glare at her sanctimoniously. It’s my fucking money he’s giving away! she wanted to yell at them but she restrained herself.

  “An exorcist,” she said. “Really. Been to too many movies lately, have we? Well at least it’s original, I’ll give you that.” She paused for control, and then wondered why. “But all the same you’re just another fucking quack, who’s come to take our money while there’s still some left...”

  Before the man could respond, one of the maids they’d persuaded to be a waitress for the night came up to them with the champagne tray. The young one, Erica noticed, who despite her unruly black hair and telltale tan was undeniably pretty. Not that Erica had to worry about that, anymore. She took a glass from the tray; the man in the white suit refused.

  “I don’t want your money,” he said gravely. “And I apologise for using the word ‘exorcist’ but there is no other you’d understand. What I do is not based on religion; I don’t believe in ghosts or demons...”

  “Then what,” Erica said, “do you believe?”

  “I believe there are... entities,” he said, “or maybe not even that. Forces. Generated by the laws of physics like the rest of creation, but other. Attracted to our otherness, maybe. I believe they can enter us, influence us once inside, use us for their own ends without us even being aware...”

  “What shit.”

  “And I believe such a force is in your husband.” The man’s voice was still level, but his eyes were ablaze, she realised, as if in some other reality he was hollering the words from a pulpit.

  “You’re crazy,” Erica said. “Forces? Just make a donation and piss off. It’s such a worthy cause,” she added, her voice a bitter parody of her husband’s. “Do you know how many children suffer disfiguring injuries on our roads?”

  When his hand gripped hers to stop her turning from him it was if anything even hotter than before, although still bone dry.

  “Do you really believe,” he said, “that your husband is himself?” And he looked (so she looked) towards the man on stage, expensive tailored suit hanging like a cloak from his slim body (Charles had been fasting for weeks), not even stepping up to take the applause as he gave another chunk of his fortune away. “What have you got to lose?” the man in the white suit added.

  At this rate not much, Erica thought, as the reporters from the local newspaper rose yet again to take a picture of a cheque being handed over.

  Charles Taschen was a man made by both old money and new, able to trace his inherited wealth back generations but also a canny investor who had made his own fortune on top of that bequeathed to him. Or so he liked to tell people. He lived in the same city he had grown up in, but on a new estate he’d built himself, isolated from the rest by high walls, private security, and CCTV. Erica was his second wife and only ten years younger than him. She’d hardly been destitute when she married him—the same newspaper which had insinuated she was a gold-digger was the one so desperate for pictures of her husband’s largesse now. How she hated them, how she disliked the way the cheap ink came off on her hands when she read them. But still, they had a point, for whatever words might have realistically been used to describe Charles Taschen when she married him, ‘charitable’ wouldn’t have been one of them. ‘Lavish’ or ‘opulent’, maybe, ‘decadent’ certainly. Like some kind of latter day Gatsby his parties had been renowned but, Erica had soon learnt, they hadn’t been thrown to lure just one woman to him. Lure several in reality, lure scores of women over the years, sometimes in pairs or threes. And lure the people with drugs, with the
champagne, with the imported absinthe from some unknown source. Lure the judges to get him off his traffic offences, lure the police commissioners to make sure he didn’t get caught again. Worse than traffic offences maybe; Erica had never known.

  Lure Erica. She hadn’t much minded, the first few years, and in the more recent ones, well, at least the champagne had kept flowing.

  Had.

  There had been no gradual change. Looking at the man in the uncrumpled white suit, with his angular features but fiery eyes she had to admit to the thought that Charles had been acting like a man possessed. She’d meant metaphorically, but still—there was no physical sign of disease, no infection or brain tumour pressing against some vital nerve. No obvious psychological issues or drug flashbacks had distorted Taschen’s view of reality as far as anyone could tell. He just seemed to have decided, one day, to fast, to meditate and lock himself away for hours, and to give away all of his fortune bit by bit. To renounce drink and drugs and fast cars and, well, renounce Erica too. The fact that he seemed to have renounced all other women as well was surprisingly little comfort.

  And didn’t she have to admit that since it had started she’d often spoken to him like he was a different person? “Give me back my marriage!” she’d yelled at him one day, as if he were a stranger who had taken something physical from her.

  Fuck it, she thought. “Okay, what are you proposing?” she said to the man in the white suit.

  The quick flash of a smile as quickly repressed was not something she expected from him, nor the eager, hungry aspect it so briefly leant him.

  “Charles, this is Mr. Staedtler ,” Erica said, introducing him as most of the other guests were leaving. Her husband’s smile, sincere and solicitous to someone he’d never met before, made her sick. That smile, that goddamn smile—how many times had she wanted to slap it from his face?

  “He’s an exorcist,” she said; Staedtler had been right, there was no other word. Perhaps that was why none of this seemed real.

  “An exorcist?” Charles said. “Do we still have those? I thought the demons had given up on us, or us on them.” Despite the way his personality had changed his voice was still the same; he still had that Taschen lilt that had got him so much in life. Mr. Staedtler didn’t interrupt and so Charles continued. “Still, I suppose those unfortunates in the city hospice or the asylum might still believe in it all. Devils and angels. Some placebo effect. So yes, yes—how much do you want?” His smile broadened, intolerably.

  “Charles, he doesn’t want your money!” Erica said in dismay. “Our money, remember?” But it wasn’t, according to the terms of the prenup. Her lawyer had double- and triple-checked the exemption clauses—Erica knew them by heart. And as no one could say Charles Taschen was mad or being coerced by others, he was free to piss away his money as he wished... Erica fiddled with the weight of the wedding ring on her finger; that at least was unambiguously hers.

  “I don’t want your money, Mr. Taschen,” Staedtler said. He had refused to disclose his first name to her; looking at his humourless, excessively grave face Erica wondered if she had imagined his fervent smile earlier. Maybe if you spend all your time thinking you’re saving souls you become like that, she thought. But then, Staedtler didn’t believe in souls; he’d said so.

  “That’s good,” Charles said, “not to want. Wanting is the source of so much pain...”

  Erica wanted to scream.

  “I don’t believe in demons,” Mr. Staedtler continued, “or poltergeists or... I don’t believe. But I know there are forces that can corrupt people, infect them from outside. Your current actions might seem like your own choices to you, but to Mrs. Taschen and me they look like those of someone, something else.”

  “You think I’m possessed? By some kind of spirit?”

  “If we must talk in those terms, then yes. One that is antithetical to your own position.”

  “But I’m doing good,” Taschen said, in the voice of one announcing the first mate in an inevitable victory.

  “Escapism,” Staedtler said flatly. “You are retreating from the real world, from the full range of emotional experience. Not feeling anger, not feeling avarice, not feeling jealousy or hurt or lust—these are all still not feeling.”

  Charles paused before he replied, and it was in that pause that Erica started to think that maybe, just maybe there was something in what Staedtler claimed. For her husband’s face seemed to flutter with confusion, his expression briefly more complicated than that of the serene, pacific person he had become. Could there really be something alien in him, something this man in his white suit could cast out?

  “He can help,” Erica said to Charles. “Help you feel like you did again.”

  “And what would this process involve?” Charles said.

  “Isolation in the first instance. Quarantine.”

  “Quarantine? Am I infectious?” Charles said, smiling.

  “Maybe,” Staedtler said. “But then we talk. Just talk. It may take some days.”

  “Talk? You can talk a demon out of me?”

  “I don’t believe in demons. But yes.”

  It was agreed that Staedtler would stay in the Taschen house for the duration of the ‘cure’ and so Erica called the pretty maid to take him to one of the guest rooms. She noticed Staedtler didn’t meet the girl’s gaze as she smiled at him; he avoided looking at her behind as she led him from the room. Charles hadn’t looked, either—she’d checked. She turned her wedding ring around her finger again. All the various frustrations she felt due to the changes in her husband focused into one within her; she sat next to Charles, not bothering to pull her dress down when it hitched up. She was on stage but no one was left to watch. She leant into him, let him feel the curves of her, the heat of her. He’d have been on her in a second in the old days, she remembered, even if he had just fucked one of his interns at work hours before. He would have tried at least.

  But she saw he had retreated inside himself, as he’d been doing ever since the changes; he called it meditation but it was more like a trance, like he was somewhere else. Quarantine, she thought bitterly, he’s already fucking quarantined himself. He normally came out of one of these trances with some new idea about how he could help the poor, the dispossessed, the powerless. And tell Erica how he was going to finance it in a rapturous voice, tears of joy in his eyes. They were still tears of joy even when she shrieked at him, once scratched his face. How could he just give it all away!

  “Charles! Charles!” she said, shaking him. “Come back to me.” The desperate actions of her hands across his chest, then lower, made her despise herself. But she had to try one more time. His eyes flickered open at the touch, his mouth framed a smile as he looked at her and for a moment she thought...

  But the love in his expression was the same serene love he had for all the world now, not particular to her. And she knew no other part of his body was reacting to her touch, as if she weren’t there at all, but just a ghost.

  Fine then, she thought as she stood up. So be it.

  He had already closed his eyes and gone back into himself by the time she reached the door.

  Erica went to the smoking room, opened the liquor cabinet and poured herself a glass of Charles’ most expensive port (he’d already auctioned off the unopened bottles in his spirit collection) and called for the maid.

  “Tell Mr. Staedtler he can join me for a drink if he wishes,” she said. “I don’t want to drink alone,” she surprised herself by adding. Volunteering such secrets to the hired staff! But she felt a strange kinship with the curly haired girl—Charles wasn’t trying to sleep with either of them.

  While she waited for Staedtler she made a phone call, the result of which was ... satisfactory. No one could blame her. She’d tried.

  She was still smiling when he came in, looking awkward in his white suit.

  “You’ve not changed for dinner?” she said, enjoying how uncomfortable he looked. Despite his protests she poured him a drink, sat
and gestured for him to sit next to her. When he gracelessly did so, she saw that one of his cuff buttons was hanging from white thread, saw worn patches at his elbows. You might not have asked for money, she thought, but you do need it.

  “Your organisation,” she said, “is it just you?”

  He didn’t look at her. “Others help,” he said. “When they can. But I can’t pay them. Most think what we do is scripted, a confidence trick.”

  “So, you didn’t ask for money up front to cure my husband but when you do—if you do—a ‘donation would be much appreciated’, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  He snorted, a repressed bitter laugh. It was the first real emotion she had seen from him. “Maybe I’ve got one of them inside of me too, stopping me. A demon.”

  “You just want to help people?” Erica said. Her hands touched his, bone dry and brick hot. “Maybe you can help me.”

  Whether he did so out of lust or whether it was just to help her she didn’t mind, nor did she mind the brief, shocked glimpse of the maid’s face at the door.

  “This had better work,” she said the next day, “for Charles’ sake.”

  “You shouldn’t be coming in with me,” Mr. Staedtler said. “When it’s out of him it might be... unpredictable.”

  “Do you think I trust you in there alone?” Erica said. “What if I find out when you’ve finished you’ve fleeced him of the rest of our fortune?”

  Without another word Staedtler went into Charles’ room.

  “The exorcist! Well this will be interesting...” Charles said, as Erica entered and shut the door behind her.

  After that she struggled to remember much, the whole process blurred in her memory, like something that had occurred only in the corner of her vision. She remembered Mr. Staedtler reading from a book, and then making Charles read aloud from the same book, and her husband’s confused words: “What is this, stories? Fairy tales?” Staedtler hadn’t replied, but remained as unsmiling as he had the previous night. And the words he made Charles read aloud had seemed at once both crystal clear and unintelligible; each had seemed to ring inside of Erica like the chime of a just-tuned bell. It was like all the incidentals in her life were shown for what they were, stripping her thoughts and feelings back to the actual reality of her being: this, this, is who I am. And her husband, her husband...