The Demonologist

by Andrew Pyper

  Yet it turns out to be something else. She is adjusting the direction of her mind so that she can travel along my line of thinking. Not that she’s accepting what I’m saying. She’s just gone into diagnosis mode.

  “Are you talking about her spirit?” she starts. “Like a ghost?”

  “I don’t think so, no. That would imply she’s already fully gone.”

  “Purgatory, then.”

  “Something like that.”

  “She told you this?”

  “I tried to take my life yesterday,” I say, and it comes out simply, matter-of-factly, like I’ve just confessed to having my teeth cleaned.

  “Oh, David.”

  “It’s okay. Tess stopped me.”

  “The memory of her, you mean? You thought of her and couldn’t do it.”

  “No. Tess stopped me. She threw a photo off the wall to let me know she was there. That I had a job to do.”

  “And what job is that?”

  “Following signs.”

  “How does that work, precisely?”

  “There’s nothing precise about it.”

  “How does it imprecisely work?”

  “I think it’s about opening my mind. Using what I know of the world, of myself. All that I’ve studied and taught, all that I’ve read. Thinking and feeling at the same time. Screwing the lid off my imagination so I can see what I’ve trained myself—what we’ve all trained ourselves—not to see.”

  “Darkness visible,” she says.

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s hell I’m being lured into. But if it is, maybe Tess is there, too.”

  O’Brien sighs again. Except this time I know what it is. A shiver.

  “You’re scaring me,” she says.

  “Which part? The me believing Tess wants me to search for her in the underworld part? Or the me as runaway mental patient part?”

  “Can I say both?”

  She laughs a little at this. Not because it’s funny, but because she’s just heard some things any sane person would have to laugh at.

  “Where are you now?” she asks.

  “Pennsylvania. I’m on the road.”

  “You think Tess might be there?”

  “I’m just driving. Looking for signs that’ll take me closer.”

  “And you’re going to find them in Pennsylvania?”

  “North Dakota, I’m hoping.”

  “What?”

  “It’s complicated. I’d feel like a bit of an idiot if I told you.”

  “David? The truth? You already sound like a bit of an idiot.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Seriously. I don’t know what to make of all this.”

  “I’m crazy.”

  “Maybe not entirely crazy. But I have to tell you, you’ve got me worried. Do you hear what you’re saying?”

  “Yes. It’s got me pretty goddamn worried, too.”

  A pause now. It’s O’Brien readying to go where she has to go.

  “David?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What really happened in Venice?”

  “Tess fell,” I say, deciding I’ve said far too much already. “I lost her.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what took you there in the first place. Why Tess did what she did. Because you know, don’t you? You don’t believe it was suicide.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So tell me.”

  I want to. But the story of the Thin Woman and the man in the chair and the voice of the Unnamed is all too much to share. It would risk alienating the fragile link I still have to O’Brien, and I need her to be on my side. And then there’s the matter of her safety. The more she knows, the greater danger I am putting her in.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t. Not yet.”

  “Fine. But answer me this.”

  “Okay.”

  O’Brien takes a breath. Slow and rattling. She doesn’t want to ask what’s coming next, but she can’t stand with me if she doesn’t.

  “Did you have any part in what happened to Tess?”

  “Any part? I don’t understand.”

  “Did you hurt her, David?”

  As stunning as this question is, I immediately see where it’s coming from. My talk about signs and spirits and purgatory may be the result of guilt. O’Brien’s doubtlessly seen it before in her practice. An unbearable conscience that seeks relief through fantasy.

  “No. I didn’t hurt her.”

  As soon as this is out I’m struck by its not-quite-truthful aspects. Wasn’t I the one who brought the Unnamed back to the hotel from Santa Croce 3627? Wouldn’t Tess be here today if it weren’t for my accepting the Thin Woman’s money? I didn’t harm my daughter. But there’s still guilt.

  “Forgive me,” O’Brien says. “But I had to ask, you know? To clear the deck.”

  “No apology necessary.”

  “This is just a lot to digest.”

  “I get that. But O’Brien?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t call the guys in white coats to bring me in. Please. I know how I must sound. But don’t try to stop me.”

  This isn’t an easy one for her. I can tell by how long it takes her to calculate the risks of making such a promise, the responsibility she now carries if something bad were to happen to me. Or, it occurs to me now, if I were to do something bad to someone else.

  “Okay,” she says finally. “But you have to call me. Got it?”

  “I will.”

  She wants to know more, but she doesn’t ask. It gives me a chance to ask about how she’s feeling, what the doctors are saying, if she’s in any discomfort. Other than “a little stiffness in the mornings,” she reports she’s feeling fine.

  “And who gives a shit about the doctors?” she says. “They’ve given me enough opiate scripts to entertain a dozen rehab patients for a month. The doctors are done with me. And I’m done with them.”

  With O’Brien, I know she’s serious. She will manage her illness and, when the time comes, her death, with defiance and dignity. Yet when speaking about the cancer, buried just beneath the surface of her words, there is a serrated edge of anger, too. Just like me. We’ve both decided to get pissed off at the invisible thieves that have sneaked into our lives.

  “I’m going to get back on the road,” I say when I can tell she doesn’t want to linger on the topic any longer.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “Even if you think it’s a mirage.”

  “Sometimes mirages turn out to be real. Sometimes there’s water in the desert.”

  “I love you, O’Brien.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” she says, and hangs up.

  I TRAVEL ON INTO THE IRON BELT OF PENNSYLVANIA, THE INTERSTATE cozying up to the outskirts of pulp mill and foundry towns, the faded billboards promising them as A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE! and suggesting I STOP ON BY . . . YOU’LL BE GLAD YOU DID! But I don’t stop. Keep rolling on into early evening, the sun drowsing behind the smokestacks and tree lines.

  At one point, a ladybug lands on top of the dash. The windows are closed, and I hadn’t noticed it before. And yet there it is, staring back at me.

  It makes me think—as nearly all things do now—of Tess. A memory that surprises me in its possibilities for rereading. What it says about her. About us. The things she might have been able to see from almost the very beginning, even as I was perfecting my blindness to them.

  Once, soon after she’d turned five, Tess asked me to leave the bedside lamp on when I was putting her to bed. Until then, she’d never displayed any fear of the dark. When I asked her about it, she shook her head in you’re-not-getting-it-Dad frustration.

  “It’s not the dark I’m afraid of,” she corrected me. “It’s what’s in the dark.”

  “Okay. What’s in the dark that’s got you scared?”

  “Tonight?” She pondered this. Closed her eyes, as th
ough summoning a vision to her mind. Opened them again once she got it. “Tonight, it’s a ladybug.”

  Not ghosts. Not the Thing That Lives Under The Bed. Not even spiders or worms. A ladybug. I tried to stifle it, but she caught me laughing anyway.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, honey. It’s just . . . ladybugs? They’re so small. They don’t sting. They have those cute little spots.”

  Tess looked at me with an intensity that pulled the smile off my face.

  “It’s not how a thing looks that makes it bad,” she said.

  I promised her that, good or bad, there were definitely no ladybugs in the apartment. (It was the middle of winter. Not to mention I’d never seen one the whole time we’d lived there, or anywhere else in Manhattan for that matter.)

  “You’re wrong, Daddy.”

  “Yeah? How are you so sure of that?”

  She pulled the bedsheet up to her chin and turned her eyes to the bedside table. When I followed her line of sight, it led to a single ladybug on its surface. Not there a moment ago.

  Thinking it a toy or the dried husk of some long-dead creepy crawler discovered under a rug—and placed there by way of clever sleight of hand on Tess’s part—I leaned closer in to inspect it. With my nose only a couple inches away, it scuttled around to face me. Opened its shell to test its black wings.

  “Sometimes, monsters are real,” Tess said, rolling over, leaving me alone with the ladybug staring up at me. “Even if they don’t look like monsters.”

  WHEN THE MUSTANG STARTS TO BUCK AND I GASP AWAKE TO FIND I’ve drifted onto the gravel shoulder, I figure it’s time to look for a place to spend the night. The next town coming up? Milton. Pop. 6650. Another sign. Or empty coincidence. I’m too tired to decide.

  There’s a Hampton Inn just off the highway (“FREE CNT. BKFST! CBL TV!”) and I check in, buy a six-pack and a burger and eat in my room, the curtains drawn. Outside, the interstate hums and yawns. Television advertising alive within the walls.

  When she was younger, one of the games Tess and I used to play together was Warmer/Colder. She would choose some item in the apartment and whisper it to Diane—her princess hand puppet, the kitchen juicer—and I would have to search for it with only her calls of “Warmer!” and “Colder!” as a guide. Sometimes, the secret item would be herself. And I would shuffle closer to her, hands out, feeling the air like a blind man. War-mer! Waaaaar-mer! Hotter! RED HOT! My reward was a giggling hug as I mercilessly tickled my prey.

  Now here I am, in Milton, Pennsylvania. Searching in the dark.

  “Am I getting warmer?” I ask the room.

  The silence brings on a new wave of worry. And a gnawing in my gut unquieted by the double bacon-and-cheese. Missing someone feels like hunger. An insatiable emptiness right at the core of yourself. If I linger here, thinking about her, it will swallow me up.

  And I can’t disappear yet.

  I grab Tess’s journal from the car. Start from the beginning this time. Much of what she records is what you’d expect. The normalcy of her observations—the “dippy” boys in her class, the loss of her best friend who moved to Colorado, the at-the-blackboard humiliations of her “onion smelly” math teacher—are a relief to me. The longer her entries remain on this ground, the longer I can entertain the possibility that she was as she appeared. A smart, bookishly aloof girl, defender of fellow nerds, happy in all the ways that matter.

  Yet even the recollection of happiness can have a countereffect. Knowing a moment is not only past but never to be spoken of again brings a whole new kind of pain.

  I’m probably the only kid in school who likes going to the doctor and the dentist and the guy who checks your eyes. Not because I like dentists or doctors or eye guys. It’s because most of the time when Dad signs me out to do this stuff, we’re actually skipping school.

  It started maybe a year or two ago. Dad had to take me to the dentist, and when we were done instead of dropping me back at school we took the rest of the day off and visited the Statue of Liberty. I remember the wind was so strong on the ferry going over that his Mets ball cap with the sweatstain around the edge that drives Mom INSANE blew off his head and dropped into the river. Dad pretended he was about to jump in after it and this lady thought he was really going to do it and screamed her head off! After Dad calmed her down he told me only an idiot would jump into the Hudson to get a Mets cap back. “If it was the Rangers? Then maybe . . . ”

  After that, we started skipping school on purpose.

  Here’s how the scam works:

  Dad signs me out—showing up out of nowhere, so I never know when I’m gonna get sprung—and we decide what to do only after we hit the street. Most of the time we just walk and walk around the city, looking at stuff, talking and talking. Dad calls it “Playing tourists in your backyard.” I call it Wandering Around New York. Doesn’t matter. It’s the BEST.

  So far this year, we’ve ended up on this street in Chelsea with these weird art galleries (there was this one sculpture of a man with flowers growing out of his bum!), went for not one, not two, but THREE carriage rides around Central Park, and had a Vietnamese noodle picnic halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  This week we joined a line without knowing what the line was for. Turned out to be the Empire State Building. I hadn’t been up there before. Neither had Dad.

  “I’ve seen the photos,” he said.

  “Photos are never the same as the real thing,” I said.

  After about an hour we went up the elevator and out to where you can see the whole of Manhattan. The park, the two rivers, what looked like little TVs in Times Square.

  It was weird how quiet the city is from up there. What’s noise on the street is like a hum. Something tuning up. You can’t tell if it’s getting ready to howl like an animal or sing like an angel.

  I read on. Not sure what I’m looking for. More, I suppose. More of her. More of what I knew, as well as what I didn’t.

  And I find it.

  There’s a boy who’s coming to visit a lot lately. Not in this world, but the Other Place. A boy who is no longer a boy.

  His name is TOBY.

  He’s so sad it’s almost too hard to be with him. But he says he is meant for us. Because something Very Bad where he comes from has a message for Dad. And TOBY is going to deliver it.

  TOBY says he’s sorry. That he wishes he could just hang out, show me he’s still just a kid, like me. Once, he said he’d like to kiss me. But I know, if the thing asked him to, he would pull my tongue out with his teeth if we ever did.

  I don’t know a Toby. And as much as I don’t want to know this one, I believe I soon will.

  She is you, O’Brien said. But Tess acknowledged her demons—our demons—in a way I never could.

  Until now.

  On the next page there’s a drawing. Like me, Tess was more a writer and talker than a drawer, and the image she has sketched here is rudimentary. At the same time, the image is all the more striking for its simplicity. The few details that distinguish it, that make it more than just “A Man Outside a House,” indicate the intent behind them. In a glance I can see that Tess has witnessed this scene before. Or had it shown to her.

  A flat horizon. So broad it travels from one page over to the next, though no part of the picture appears on the second page other than this straight line of land and towering sky. It works to isolate the subject matter even more.

  On the first page, a square house with a single tree in the yard, a straight gravel lane leading up. A fat wasps’ nest under the topmost point of the gabled roof. A rake leaning against the tree. And me. Approaching the front door with a mouth drawn straight-lined to show grimness, or perhaps pain.

  Only two words on the page. Darkly etched beneath the ground I stand on like a system of roots.

  Poor DADDY

  I close the journal with shaking hands.

  TV. I get it now. It’s the crushing loneliness of motel rooms that makes everyone turn on the
TV immediately upon entering.

  I flip the channels until I hit CNN. And there it all is: the great American pageant of distraction. I crack open a can of Old Milwaukee and let my vision blur at the split-screens and ticker tapes of information. Body counts, celebrity rehab ins-and-outs, box-office takes. The talking heads wearing so much foundation they look like ingeniously animated figures from Madame Tussaud’s.

  I’m not really watching. Not really listening. But something draws me closer to the screen.

  It takes a while to stir myself to full attention and figure out it’s not a passing news item or spoken name that struck me, but numbers. A series of digits skittering across the bottom of the screen. Each of them preceded by a city. The world’s closing stock market indexes for April 27th.

  . . . NYSE 12595.37 . . . TSE 9963.14 . . . TSX 13892.57 . . . DAX 5405.53 . . . LSE 5906.43 . . .

  New York. Tokyo. Toronto. Frankfurt. London.

  The world will be marked by our numbers.

  And it has been.

  But what does it mean? Proof. That’s what the man in the chair had promised. At the time, the voice that wished to be known as a collective of demons didn’t answer what the numbers would prove. It would be clear when the time came. Which it is, now. The correctly foretold stock market closings prove the voice was right, that it predicted a series of events beyond any reasonable chance of coincidence or opportunity for trickery, something a man in a Venetian attic, sane or otherwise, could never do. The passing of one of Brother Guazzo’s tests. One that establishes the voice as inhuman.

  That it is real.

  I’m up. Tossing the beer can in the garbage, where it attempts a leaping escape with spits of foam. Pacing back and forth, from washing hands at the bathroom sink to squinting out the peephole at the highwayside night.

  The Unnamed had made a promise of his own.

  When you see the numbers, you have only until the moon.

  The moon itself isn’t a time. But it belongs to a rhythm, a way of measuring time. The beginning of the cycle being the new moon, when its surface is darkest. As close to the total absence of sunlight as the world comes. It’s why it plays such a large part in witchcraft lore, a tool for biblical diviners and Egyptian magicians alike. Demons, too. It’s a way to foretell a person’s death, among other things. I recall a particular method from my readings where the Moravian Jews would fix the new moon between the forks of a tree branch. In time, the face of a loved one would appear. If the leaves of the branch fell, they were destined to perish.