by Andrew Pyper
“So this concern you’re showing for me—this is coming from you alone?”
“I’ll do what I’m paid to do, Professor. I’ll do goddamn anything. But like I said before, I’m just an altar boy from Astoria at heart.”
He picks up another slice of toast but, this time, doesn’t have the stomach for it.
“So let’s try this again, David,” he says. “What brings you to Linton?”
“Hunting season.”
“Hunting your kid. Tess.”
“You know where she is?”
“Wouldn’t want to know that, to tell the truth.”
“So what do you know?”
“That she’s gone. That you think you can fix that. Not an unheard-of sort of thing, from my client’s point of view. Though, admittedly, you are regarded as a slightly special case.”
“Because of the document.”
“Because whatever you think has your daughter now has an interest in you. It’s why you have the document in the first place.”
“You’re saying I’m meant to have it?”
“You think it’s just because you’re so smart?”
The waitress stops by to top off our coffees. It takes her a few seconds longer than it should. Taking a good look. Not at the mercenary across the table, but at a suddenly sweaty, fork-shaking me.
“You and I might have different goals,” the Pursuer starts again once she’s gone. “Still, if you break it down, if you forgive some of the means, we’re both on the side of good ends, David.”
“But you can’t bring my daughter back.”
“You think he can?”
“He?”
“He. Her. It. Them. I’ve always thought of the Devil in masculine terms, myself. Haven’t you?”
“What’s the Devil got to do with it?”
“Everything. He’s why you’re out here driving around on the plains. Why you’re holding on to the thing I want. Why Tess isn’t with you anymore.”
It hits me all at once. A dizziness so severe I grip the table edges just to stay seated on the bench. I am saying too much. I am listening to someone else too much. And the Unnamed doesn’t like it.
“He . . . ”
“Speak up, Professor.”
“He has my daughter.”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “If he does, you’re never getting her back.”
“I need to speak to him.”
“He’s a liar, David. The Devil lies. He wants something from you. And right now, whatever it is you’re doing, you’re halfway to giving it to him.”
“You want something from me.”
“Yes. But maybe I can help you.”
“Can you bring my daughter back?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t help me.”
I rise from the table. And with every new inch that comes between myself and the Pursuer, my balance is returned to me. What’s he going to do? Stop me here in the middle of the morning rush at the Harvest Restaurant & Grill?
That’s exactly what he does.
His hand gripped to my shoulder as I push open the door. It turns me half around. So close his lips almost graze against my ear.
“I’ve been a gentleman this morning,” he says, and digs his fingers under the muscle of my shoulder. Wrenches it up. “But when the call comes, it won’t mean a thing to me. Understand?”
He releases me an instant before a shriek of pain can escape. Pushes me aside to be first out.
I MAKE MY WAY TO THE MUSTANG WITH MY HEAD DOWN AND ONLY notice the dog when I’ve got the keys out, opening the driver’s-side door. Its body laid on the hood. A thick sheet of blood inching down over the headlights. Eyes open, ears still standing to attention.
I’ll do goddamn anything.
Slipping my hands under the body and lifting it down to the street leaves me soaked through to the skin. The blood warm as bathwater.
I consider lifting it into the trunk and heading to a hardware store, buying a shovel, and digging a hole for it somewhere, but in the end I leave it where it is. Snuggled against the curb, blankly staring at the prairie sun.
How long do I have?
Not long, would be my guess.
As I get behind the wheel I venture a glance up at the sun myself. It burns.
I DRIVE BACK TO THE MOTEL AND SIT ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, wondering what the hell I’m doing here. That’s not quite right: I know what I’m doing here, just not how I should do it. In the unlikely chance that I’m right to be chasing a real-life demon across the American landscape, by what means do I think I might take it on? I’m not in possession of holy water or a crucifix, no gold daggers bearing seals of approval from Rome. I’m a teacher with a lapsed gym membership. Not exactly the Archangel Michael roaring down from on high.
And yet the Pursuer was right. The demon I’m after seems to have taken an interest in me. It has gone to the trouble of assuming human form to have a few words with me, most recently as the crotch-crushing girl in my car. Milton’s poem offered a warning about this very thing.
For spirits when they please
Can either sex assume, or both.
And what was Raggedy Anne’s message? That I still had more believing to do. Not just in my head, but in my body.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . .
The Word of the gospels tells the story of God and the Holy Son. But it also tells the story of temptation, sin, obstructions, demons. What if all of it isn’t merely allusion but literal history, an account of actors performing verifiable actions, both long ago and reaching into the present? Surely now, after what I’ve seen, I would be forced to accept that it’s possible. Imagine all the words and stories I’ve studied as being material, dwelling in the world. As not being stories.
Now you must believe here.
Destiny. The factor that determines where a character ends up in the ancient works I teach, though one presumed to leave the modern self untouched. But what if the modern presumption is wrong? What if this demon hunt has been my destiny ever since the scholarships lifted me out of the turquoise world I came from and allowed me the freedom to pursue a life of the mind?
It’s certainly true that when I went to university, even more than the moneyed cliques and beautiful debutantes, it was the abundance of choices that astonished me. My devotion was to literature, I knew. But which of its many tunnels would I descend into? There were brief flirtations with Dickens, with James, the Romantics. Then, to my atheistic surprise, the Bible took up an immovable place in my study carrel. And Milton soon after. His blank verse that seemed to defend the indefensible. The poem that, upon my first reading, made me weep with self-recognition when the villain tried to set aside his past and find a way out of the darkness, to use his mind alone to talk himself out of his suffering.
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost
I remember nights as a graduate student in the old Uris Library at Cornell, reading these lines and deciding This is it. A rallying cry that spoke directly to me, a fellow outsider seeking triumph not through optimism but denial. I decided I would dedicate myself to making the case for this character, this Satan, as I would make a case for myself, also fallen, also alone.
Though I never admitted it to anyone, I sometimes saw another in the stacks with me on those evenings. A presence that seemed to nudge me deeper in my commitment to my chosen course of study. At least, that’s how I interpreted the glimpses of my drowned brother. Lawrence. Dripping water onto the floor as he sat swinging his legs on a chair at the end of my table, or slipping away around the corner of a shelf, leaving a circle of greenish river water behind. Yet perhaps what I took to be encouragement was in fact a warning. Maybe Lawrence appeared to me to demonstrate how the dead—both those known in life and imagined in books—are never quite as dead as we’ve willed ourselves to believe.
So if this journey I’ve embarked on is my fate, what is my role in it? I had always seen myself as standing outside
of things, a harmless expert of cultural history, an interpreter of a forgotten language. But perhaps the Thin Woman was closer to naming my real vocation. Demonologist. Getting to Tess will require that I apply my life’s study in a practical way I’d never considered before. Start taking the mythology of evil seriously.
The first step in such a game is to determine which version of demonology we’re dealing with. Old Testament or New? The Jewish shedim of the Talmud or Platonic demons (intermediary spirits, neither god nor mortal but something in between)? Plato, now that I think of it, defined daimon as “knowledge.” Demonic power proceeds not from evil, but from knowing things.
In the Old Testament, satans (for their appearances are almost always pluralized) are wardens over the earth, carrying out tests of man’s faith in their capacity as devoted servants of God. Even in the New Testament, Satan himself is one of God’s creations, an angel who went astray. How? The abuse of knowledge. Darkness isn’t the matter from which the Antichrist was formed, but intelligence. Foreknowledge.
Like knowing the world’s stock market results a week in advance.
Clearly my demon wished to demonstrate his power in this way. To prove its intellect as much as its ability to possess, to steal.
It.
He. She.
The Unnamed.
All along, in every encounter, from the Thin Woman to Anne, the presence has refused to provide a name. It’s another way of mocking me. But it’s also one of its vulnerabilities. According to the Catholic Church’s official rite of exorcism, using the demon’s name against itself is a primary means of denying its authority.
I need to figure out the demon’s identity. From there, I might find out what it wants. Find Tess.
If I approach the question using the whole library of possibilities, throwing every demonic figure from every faith and folkloric tradition into the mix, it would be impossible to finger a suspect. But my demon has chosen me. A Miltonist. Its repeated citations from Paradise Lost can’t be seen as accidental. It is the version of the demonic universe through which it wishes to be viewed.
Which would lead us to Pandemonium. The council chambers where Milton described Satan assembling his disciples for their debate over the best ways to undermine God’s rule.
We know their names.
Moloch.
Chemos.
Baalim.
Ashtaroth.
Thammuz.
Astoreth.
Dagon.
Rimmon.
Osiris.
Isis.
Orus.
Belial.
My Unnamed is among these. And I have only three days to figure out which one.
Satan himself can be eliminated, if the voice that spoke through Marco Ianno is to be taken at its word. Indeed, the fact that the Unnamed arranged for a preintroduction, a kind of fanfare prior to its appearance, says something of its character. Pride. Conceit. Showmanship. And the reliance on Milton provides more than just clues. It shows how the presence sees itself as a scholar, too. A kinship—as well as a competition—with me.
I will have to discover the name of the Unnamed through a reading of its personality. Milton ascribed characteristics to the members of the Stygian Council, a way of distinguishing them, “humanizing” them.
So that’s what I will be. A demon profiler.
15
FINDING THE REYES PLACE TURNS OUT TO BE AS EASY AS OPENING the phone book in my motel room and mapping the address on my iPhone. Not far. Only 6.2 miles from where I sit, apparently. If I start now I’ll be there well before lunch.
There is the problem of the Pursuer, of course. If I drive out to the Reyes farm with him on my tail it might not only alert him to the twin sisters’ little mystery, it may be enough provocation for his client to give him the order to take me down. I need to find out if I’m right or wrong about coming to Linton. Without him.
This has me stumped until I look out the front window and see the Pursuer’s Crown Victoria parked just twenty feet from the Mustang. It appears he’s a guest here now, too. And he doesn’t mind my knowing it.
Aware that he’s likely watching my every move, I walk out to the motel’s office and ask to borrow a screwdriver and an ice bucket. Fill the latter with water. Walk back toward my room (looking like a man ready to plop some cubes into his soda) and stop by the side of the Pursuer’s car. Use the screwdriver to wrench the locked gas tank flap open, then screw off the cap. Pour the ice bucket’s water into the tank.
Then I’m running.
I’m behind the wheel of the Mustang and reversing by the time the Pursuer comes out of his room—unhurried at first, then, when he sees the gas cap on the ground, a focused alarm—so that I’m able to take in the full fury of his glare.
It’s all different now, he’s telling me. No more dead dog threats, no more warnings. When the order comes, he’ll not only carry it out, he’ll take his time.
But I can’t linger on this, not least because he’s now running himself. At me. His hands held out before him like he’s prepared to claw his way through the windshield.
My foot comes down on the gas and I shoot past him, purposely taking the wrong turn and then going around the block and heading south out of town unseen. It won’t take him long to get new wheels.
But mine are already rolling. Already gone.
IT’S A SHORT DRIVE SOUTH OUT OF LINTON TO THE CROSSROADS hamlet of Strasburg, then west a couple miles to the Reyes farm. Not that there’s much growing on the land at the moment. The fields on either side of the property’s gravel lane have been tilled but unseeded, so that only stray weeds poke up from the earth. It leaves the Reyes’ farmhouse to stand out even more than it otherwise would. A white clapboard toy sticking out on the endless horizon.
The same house—the same horizon—as the one Tess drew in her journal.
Out front, the lone tree with a rake leaning against it, the handle split from long exposure to the sun. Under the highest eave, a gray wasps’ nest glued to the wood, a black hole at the bottom seething with furious comings and goings. On the ground, weeds grown thick and thorned as rolls of barbed wire along the front path. It’s as though the entire farm and the work once done on it stopped some years ago, and now it is halfway to becoming something else, a return to undisciplined scrub.
And me. Now making my way up to the porch, my face stiffened in apprehension.
Tess had seen all of this. Had known I would come.
Poor DADDY.
The front door is ajar. The police? A neighbor dropping off a basket of eggs? For some reason, I didn’t expect competition for Delia Reyes’ time. As I knock on the frame of the screen door I start editing my planned niceties in my head. The longer I take getting in, the greater the odds someone else might show up to haul me out.
I’m about to knock again when the inside door is pulled open to reveal a sinewy woman dressed in what appears to be layers of old sweaters and an ankle-length denim skirt. Her long hair held back in an elastic that leaves the ends bunched and brittle as the head of a broom. Brown eyes wide and alive, flickering with humor.
“Mrs. Reyes?”
“Yes?”
“My name is David Ullman. I’m not with the police. I don’t work for one of the papers.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I just came here to speak with you.”
“Seems you’re already doing that.”
“I’ll come to it, then. I understand that something unusual has happened to you, in this house, over the last few days.”
“I should say so.”
“A similar thing has happened to me. I was wondering if I might ask some questions to see if you could provide me with some answers.”
“You’ve had someone go missing, too?”
“Yes.”
“Someone close.”
“My daughter.”
“Lord.”
“It’s why I’ve come all this way to show up uninvited at your door like this.”
She pulls the screen door wide.
“Consider yourself invited,” she says.
The kitchen is large and cool, with a butcher-block table in the middle used, apparently, for both the preparation and consumption of meals. An ancient Frigidaire huffing and sighing in the corner. Side-by-side enamel sinks. A spider plant doing its best to block out the light from the window. All of it adding up to a clean, museum-quality old Dakotan farm kitchen. A heartening place if not for the turquoise walls. The color of melancholy. Of grief.
As I stand next to the table the old woman shuffles past to take the seat she was occupying when I knocked. This is what I assume anyway, given the lone coffee cup by her hands. Yet, glancing into it, it appears not only empty but clean, as though pulled off the shelf as a plaything or prop.
“Paula Reyes,” she says, offering her hand. It’s only when I take it that the significance of the name strikes me.
“Paula? I thought you were lost.”
“I was. But I’m found now, aren’t I?”
“What happened to you?”
She traces the rim of the coffee cup with a finger.
“I don’t properly know. Isn’t that something?” she says, and answers herself with a short blast of laughter. “Must have hit my head or something. Some old-lady blunder! All I remember is walking in that screen door this morning and Delia sitting right in that seat there, the one you’re leaning on, drinking coffee from this very cup, and the two of us hugging and Delia making me eggs like not a thing had passed between us.”
“That’s Delia’s cup?”
“Um-hm.”
“It’s empty.”
“She finished it.”
“But it looks untouched.”
She looks into the cup’s bottom, then back at me. “So it does,” she says.
“Are you all right?”
She doesn’t appear to hear the question.
“Do you have a sister, Mr. Ullman?” she asks.
“No. I had a brother, though. When I was young.”
“Well, then you’d know the place kin like that keep in your heart. There’s no scrubbing out that kind of stain, is there?” She shakes her head. “Blood runs deep.”