The Gift of the Demons

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I kept glancing out the window.

  “What’s up with you tonight?” asked Dad. “You are so jittery.”

  “Just worried about school,” I said.

  “You? Worried about school?” said Dad.

  “It does happen,” I said.

  “Hmm,” said Dad. He paused a moment. “You know, you can talk to me about the hard stuff. I’m your dad, but I’m not an idiot. I know that you don’t feel like you fit in very well. I know that you don’t have a lot of friends at school.”

  “I’m black,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know that, too.”

  “You can’t ever really know it,” I said quietly.

  Dad sighed. “You can still talk to me about it.”

  “It’s really not that. At least, not any more than it usually is. There was a fire at school today. Did you hear about that?”

  “No, I didn’t. How bad was it?”

  “Well, they made us go outside and wait for the fire engines to arrive. So we missed some school.”

  “I’ll bet you all were very saddened by that,” said Dad.

  “Well, it was scary,” I said.

  “Did they get it under control? You went back to school for the rest of the day, didn’t you?”

  “We did, but the fire was in Mr. Barry’s classroom. And he wasn’t at school today. It made me worry about him.”

  “I see,” said Dad.

  “I guess I feel—unsettled somehow. It seems like school isn’t the same as it used to be. Like I’ve suddenly landed in a different place and all the old rules no longer apply.” That was closer to the truth of what I had felt than I had meant to share with Dad.

  “Ah, welcome to adulthood. That’s what it feels like to me fairly often. In fact, anytime you do feel like you understand the world, watch out. Tomorrow it will be sure to change.”

  I took a breath. “That’s not what you’re supposed to say, Dad. You’re supposed to tell me it’s going to go back to normal in the morning, that everything will be fine.”

  Dad smiled wrily. “Sorry, dear. Want me to try again?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  “I’m terrible at lying, you know. Everything I think just comes blurting out. Probably the reason I will never get out of local politics. I can’t do a TV spot to save my life. And your mother says I’m the death of her social life.”

  I laugh at that. “Mom? Social life?”

  “Yeah, that’s sort of what I thought, too. But Fallin, I’m serious about you talking to me about anything. I’d rather hear about it than not hear about it, no matter what it is. There’s nothing so bad that I haven’t heard about it before, in one form or another. Teen pregnancy, STD’s, cancer, school suspensions, bombs.”

  I had the feeling he was watching my face to see if he had gotten anywhere close to what I was dealing with. He hadn’t and I was pretty sure that no matter how long I gave him, he was never going to guess that this had to do with bargains with demons.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, and gave him a hug. The hug made me feel a little better. Not that it would help me with the demons, but it felt good, at least.

  We ate a lame dinner of canned soup and cheese sandwiches Dad-style, which means open-faced in the toaster oven. Then Dad turned on the news and I watched it with him. There was a short bit on the fire at the school. And then live pictures of another fire—the one at Mr. Barry’s house. There were four fire trucks there, trying to keep it from leaping to nearby houses. I squinted at the footage and was pretty sure that I saw Rumpy in there, somewhere, his face blackened by smoke, watching behind the lines set up by the fire crew, making sure that the fire he started was put off safely.

  “No one knows how the fire started, but it appears that there is at least one death attributed to it. The firefighters were able to bring out the body of the owner, Mr. James Barry, but he could not be resuscitated,” said the reporter.

  All the marks on his body, and the weird way his skin had been dessicated, would probably never be noticed. They would think he’d died in the fire.

  “As to cause of fire, it appears that Mr. Barry was smoking and fell asleep. The fire originated inside the house, most likely in a bedroom filled with books,” the reporter went on.

  I went to bed that night feeling lucky to be alive, and determined not to tell anything I knew about Mr. Barry and the demon spells.

  But I woke up in the middle of the night and found myself walking to my desk. I sat down at it and started to write something down in one of my school notebooks.

  It wasn’t me doing it. Or it was me, but it wasn’t all of me again. That same sick feeling of helplessness came over me, like I couldn’t control my own body. Maybe you’d feel like this if you had that disease where you start swearing at people for no reason, Turrets. But I wasn’t saying anything. My hand was busy writing down the demon spell that I’d seen in Mr. Barry’s bathroom, after I’d picked the papers out of the basket and reassembled them by the sink.

  Don’t look at those words, I told myself. Don’t look.

  But my eyes stared at them and a part of me was translating them as I went.

  I’m not going to write the spell down here in its entirety. That would defeat my whole purpose in writing this book. But I also think that it might be wise to write down what’s in the spell, so that if people accidentally end up reading it, they will know what they’re reading and try to get away from it.

  Although, frankly, if you get that far, you might not be able to come back.

  The spell started with a request to be heard. Then a line where you put your own name in, and say it three times. Then you invoke heaven and earth and call out what it is you wish to receive. If heaven won’t give it to you, you ask for hell to step in. And then you promise to offer in return what is of most value to you.

  I could feel my lips starting to move.

  No, NO!

  I lifted one hand, which felt like it weighed as much as a barbell, and put it in front of my lips. I tried to put pressure on it, but it was increasingly difficult to do. I needed control over my whole body, not just one part.

  I jerked back and fell out of my chair. There was a thumping sound, and then I cried out in pain.

  Suddenly, I could hear footsteps coming toward my room.

  “Fallin, you all right?” asked Dad, knocking at the door.

  I sucked in a huge gulp of air. My air. Somehow, I was myself again, and I knew it.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Are you decent?” Dad asked.

  “You can come in,” I said, because since I turned twelve, Dad has never come into my room without asking that.

  Dad poked his head in and saw me getting off the floor. “Bad dream?” he asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “You used to sleepwalk when you were little. Did you know that? We’d find you in front of the refrigerator, eating raw cookie dough or ice cream. Or outside, climbing the tree in the front yard. Weird stuff. You were really still asleep, which made me worry even more.”

  “I know, Dad. You’ve told me about that a hundred times.” I had to ask him to stop tell stories like that about me to other people, friends and neighbors and stuff. It was embarrassing.

  “Do we need to lock the doors again? Get codes on the windows?” he asked.

  “No, Dad,” I said. “Go back to bed now.”

  “As long as you’re all right.” He closed the door behind him.

  I could feel my heart fluttering hard in my chest, going a hundred miles an hour. I had almost finished that demon summoning spell out loud. What would have happened to me if I’d done that? Would I have seen a demon like the one Carter had made his bargain with? And what would I have given up to have what I wanted?

  I tried to think what mattered to me most. Being smart, probably.

  But the weird thing is that if I valued that the most, then what would I give it up to get? I mean, how could anything else be so important to me?
/>   Maybe that was why I’d been able to stop myself. Because I hadn’t really wanted to go through with it.

  But if I had—I didn’t want to think about that.

  I sniffed around my room and realized the air was a little acrid. Dad hadn’t noticed it, maybe because he hadn’t come all the way in, but now I could see a few little spirals of smoke coming off the carpet on the floor.

  What in the world was that?

  Then I remembered Mr. Barry’s body and the marks on it.

  That wasn’t ordinary smoke. It was demon smoke. Brimstone.

  I got back into bed, but was careful to edge around all the little spirals. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t help but think about how close I had come to making a bargain with a demon.

  A few minutes later there was a tapping sound at my window.

  It freaked me out, and I froze. Do demons come knocking, even if you haven’t finished summoning them?

  “Fallin,” I heard from outside the window.

  I peeked outside the window and saw Rumpelstiltskin.

  He motioned for me to open my window.

  I thought about it for a minute, and then I shook my head. He could talk to me through the window if he wanted to talk to me.

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m worried about you. Did you read anything about bargains with demons in Mr. Barry’s house?”

  If he were in here, would he recognize the smell of brimstone immediately?

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  “I just want to help. I don’t want what happened to the others happen to you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Then why are you crying?” he asked.

  I realized I was, in fact, crying. The tears were dripping down my face and I hadn’t even noticed them. I was terrified. Of demons. And of myself. What would happen to me if I didn’t keep vigilant, twenty four hours a day? What would the demons do to me? Would I end in a wheelchair like Carter had thought he would? Or like Mr. Barry? Or just gone, disappeared like so many others?

  I wanted to live my life. I wanted to find out what was going to happen to me next. I wanted to see if I could really have my dreams. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life yet, but I did know I didn’t want a demon to take it away from me.

  I opened my window, and started shivering immediately. It wasn’t just the cold from outside. It was the reaction.

  “Thank you,” said Rumpy, as he climbed in. He was pretty agile, considering how old he was. He curled a leg over the windowsill and slid in, as if he was used to doing this kind of thing all the time.

  “You know, it might be construed the wrong way, if someone saw a guy your age coming into a young girl’s window in the middle of the night like that,” I said.

  “Luckily for me, no one is watching. I made sure of that,” he said. “And you know that I’m here only to help you about demons, nothing else.”

  “Nothing else, huh?” I said, and felt a tiny disappointment.

  “I’m not a pervert,” said Rumpy.

  “But you still won’t tell me your name?”

  His mouth twisted. “No.”

  “Why not? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I told you. If you give it to the demons, they have power over me.”

  “But why would I give it to demons?” I said.

  He sniffed around the room, and my face went suddenly red. “You’d be surprised how many people give things to demons that they would never have believed they would give.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I said.

  “You saw something, didn’t you?” said Rumpy.

  “It was just a piece of paper in the garbage. I put it together and read some of it,” I said. Why was I still lying? “But I swear, I don’t have any wish to make a bargain with a demon.”

  “And you think that will stop them from coming and finding you?” said Rumpy.

  “Why would they? I mean, what’s in it for the demons?”

  He shook his head. “You have to stop thinking that they’re anything like you. They’re not human. They don’t care about anything but winning. They don’t care about the long term. They don’t care about dying. They just want to get you now and make you miserable. There’s no way to understand demons. I know everyone thinks that bad guys are always the hero of their own story, that you just have to see things from their point of view. But it’s not like that with demons. They do what they do. They’re like computers. They’re programmed to be that way. They don’t try to evolve out of it and make friends with humans.”

  “Well, that was quite the speech.”

  He was breathing hard. “You haven’t been around them as long as I have,” he said.

  “No, I certainly haven’t. You have a few years on me there.”

  He hesitated a moment. “Look, just don’t give in to the impulse. Don’t even say a single word, if you can help it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Thanks for the advice. You can go now.”

  He didn’t go. “The words you read—were they in German or English?”

  “Does it matter?” I asked. “I mean, if I say the spell in German versus saying it in English?”

  “Not to the demons, no. But if you don’t understand the words, they don’t have the same hold on you.”

  “So if it were in Russian or something, it wouldn’t work?”

  “Oh, it would still work,” said Rumpy. “If you said the right way. And even if you got a few words wrong, it might still work. But it wouldn’t be as tempting. You wouldn’t remember it as easily if it was nonsense.”

  “It was in German,” I said.

  “Oh. Good.”

  “But it burned up in the fire,” I added.

  He nodded. “I know, but what I was worried about was how many of the English versions I have to track down. It sounds like at least Mr. Barry wasn’t the one distributing them.”

  “He wouldn’t have meant any harm,” I said, my last defense of my teacher.

  “I know,” said Rumpy. “He was a good guy. He died trying to keep his secret. He gave up his life trying to atone for what mistakes he’d made.”

  “You were at the fire,” I said.

  “Yeah. Luckily, it’s died down now. They have it under complete control. There won’t be any other houses lost.”

  “And if there had been?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It would have been worth it. Houses can be rebuilt. Souls can’t.”

  “I thought that was what demons always wanted. Souls. That’s what it says in the stories.”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t tend to call it souls anymore. Too many atheists in the picture. But it amounts to the same thing. They eat the fabric of what makes you you. And there’s not much left when they’ve done that. Once you give them an in, by allowing them to give you a gift, they’ve already got you. The rest is all downhill.”

  “So what about Carter?”

  “He’ll live. But his soul has been chewed on.”

  Wasn’t that a nice picture?

  “And me?”

  “Your soul is fine, so far as I can tell. But don’t think that making a small bargain will somehow save you. It’s all the same, in the end. If you make a bargain for anything, even a cheeseburger, you’ll still get burned.”

  And he wasn’t talking metaphorically about the burning. “Is that what you did?” I asked. “Traded your soul for a cheeseburger?”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “The smell in here—what is it?”

  “It’s rot. Soulrot,” said Rumpy. “Also known as brimstone. It’s what happens to souls after they are burned.”

  “So do you smell like that?” I asked.

  “A little,” he said.

  “And what does my soul smell like?” I asked, curious.

  He closed his eyes for a long moment, and I thought how nice his lips were. The rest of him looked old, but his lips were thick and soft and pink, with just a hint of dryness around the edg
es. Beneath them were strong, straight teeth, and his tongue, which darted out now and again.

  “It smells clean, like Ivory soap,” he said.

  It was sadly, one of the most romantic things anyone had ever said to me.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Time for me to go now,” he said.

  “So now you’re going to leave and I’ll never see you again, right? Off to other places to fight demons there?”

  “If nothing else happens here,” he said. “Then yes.”

  “Nothing to hold you here.”

  He stared at me. “No.”

  I yawned. “Sorry,” I said. That was kind of rude, wasn’t it? But it was the middle of the night.

  “Right. You go back to sleep. I go back—to my life, such as it is. And we will hopefully never meet again,” he said, and pulled himself to the other side of the window.

  He looked reluctant to leave. He seemed the kind of person who was lonely, no matter how many people were standing in the same room with him or how many conversations he got into. He didn’t tell the truth in any of them, didn’t let anyone see who he really was. Everything about him was part of his mask.

  “Good luck to you,” I said.

  “Ha,” he said. “There is no such thing as luck. There’s only the demons winning sooner or the demons winning later.”

  He curled his legs back over the window sill, slid down to the grass and then started off across the lawn at a pretty good click. When I couldn’t see him anymore, I closed my window, tucked myself under my blankets, and shivered there for a long time. It wasn’t just the air in the room that was cold, it was my heart.

  I was pretty sure Rumpy had made a bargain with demons himself. But what for? And why was he still here, fighting them?

  Chapter 9

  I went to Mr. Barry’s funeral on Thursday afternoon, along with the rest of the school. Well, most of the school, anyway. They closed school so we could all go, but not everyone showed up. I’m not sure I blamed them. There were plenty of people who hadn’t known Mr. Barry from Adam, and even the ones of us who had were disappointed in the funeral. No one talked about him the way we remembered him, his quirks of precision, the way he would teach a class like it was storytime at the library. No one mentioned the huge number of books he had collected, or how that had contributed to his death, either.