by Andrew Pyper
“Why did you come?” I ask.
She meets my eyes.
“To help you,” she says.
“Help me back to New York?”
She places both hands under my jaw. Pulls my face close, so that all I can see is her.
“Here’s a promise,” she says. “No more questions, no more doubt, no more therapy-speak. I’m in. You got that?”
“In for what?”
“Finding Tess. And when we find her, we’re going to bring her home.”
Tess.
Home.
Hearing these two words together in the same sentence, spoken by someone who seems to feel that it may be possible to connect them, that it’s worth trying to connect them—it’s enough to pull the plug on the last days’ tubful of accumulated emotion. I’m crying. Crying like I have no memory of ever crying before. A messy, horking, red-cheeked breakdown while standing buckled over in the middle of Room 12 of the Scotsman Inn of Wichita.
It’s quite a show. Not that O’Brien lets me indulge in it for long.
“Give me the keys,” she says. “I’ll drive.”
AS O’BRIEN KEEPS HER EYES ON THE ROAD, I TELL HER EVERYTHING. Or pretty much everything—the exception being Tess’s journal, which for some reason feels too private to share. But I recall for her the Thin Woman. The professor in the chair in Venice. The correct foretelling of the world’s stock market results. The Pursuer. The Unnamed appearing in different forms, though always those of the already dead. The Dakota. The Sunshine State. Tess, silently calling for me.
How we only have two and a half days until the new moon.
The whole time O’Brien doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t ask a question. Just lets me ramble on and pile fact upon interpretation upon impossibility. When I finish, she drives on another few miles before she speaks.
“What do you think these clues are leading you toward?” she says.
“I don’t really know. I suspect they’re leading me closer to the Unnamed.”
“So it can do what? Destroy you?”
“It could’ve done that anytime, probably.”
“You sure? That hitchhiker attacked you.”
“Don’t remind me,” I say, involuntarily cupping myself.
“Then how are you so sure it doesn’t want you dead?”
“It probably does. Eventually. Just not yet.”
“Not yet. Not before this?” O’Brien sweeps her hand around the car’s interior, littered with fast-food wrappers and coffee cups and the road atlas open across my lap. “Why do you have to follow bread crumbs across the country?”
I recall what the introductory voice said to me out of the man’s mouth in Venice. How we weren’t enemies, but conspirators.
“To ask me to be a part of something,” I say.
“You’re saying it has a purpose for you.”
“Yes. Though it hasn’t said what that is.”
“The document. You have that. And if it’s all you say it is, it’s proof of something that has only existed in mankind’s imagination before this. Just absorb that for a second.”
“It’s something, all right.”
“It’s enormous,” she says, smacking the dash. “Demons are real and exist among us. Not metaphorically, but literally. It’s astounding.”
“I’d certainly have to rewrite all my lectures.”
“Makes you wonder what they’re up to.”
“John the Revelator would say they are readying us.”
“For what? The Big End?”
“That comes a bit later. First, the descent. The apocalypse. The Antichrist.”
“Thanks a lot, Debbie Downer.”
“It’s the Bible, not Danielle Steel.”
We drive on in silence for a time. Each of us trying to hide the shudders that our conclusions provoke.
“Okay, let’s not speculate,” O’Brien finally announces. “Let’s just say that, in the immediate term, that document of yours potentially signifies the biggest development in religious and social history for at least the past two thousand years.”
“This is hurting my brain.”
“And I think that’s part of it,” she says, building steam. “We can’t handle this stuff. It’s like those UFOlogists or whatever they call themselves. The Area 51 conspiracy theorists.”
“Roswell.”
“Who knows? Maybe your clues will lead us there. Does ‘Roswell’ show up anywhere in Milton’s Collected Works?”
“You were making a point?”
“The point is, what’s the argument that the aliens-made-the-pyramids people always make? Why do they feel the comings and goings of extraterrestrials are a vast secret the government is refusing to let us in on?”
“It would blow our minds.”
“That’s it. Mass panic. Dow Jones goes to zero. Global anarchy and horror. Everybody disappears into their bomb shelters, everyone else rapes and pillages. It would be the End Times of our own making. Why condition any of our actions anymore? Why bother with morality or the law? They’re coming! All of us waiting for the little green men to probe us or decimate us or turn us into shrubbery.”
“You think it’s the same with demons?”
“No. I don’t think the government knows more about Satan and his cohorts than any Sunday school graduate.”
“So what would the document mean?”
“Verification. Legitimacy. There are all sorts of religious texts out there, all manner of belief. But there’s no proof. Nobody thinks there ever could be proof.”
“That’s why they call it faith.”
“Exactly.”
“Except now there is proof.”
“There is, if David Ullman decides to open up his Manhattan bank deposit box. And if its implications are what we think they are, it makes video of an E.T. in a body bag look like a slow news day.”
I lean forward to look into the passenger-door mirror. Checking the highway behind for the square grille of the Crown Victoria.
“That’s why the Pursuer wants it,” I say.
“And maybe the Unnamed wants the same thing.”
“Why? It showed me what it wanted to. I didn’t take anything, it gave it to me.”
“That might be the point.”
“If it is, I’m not getting it.”
“We have to assume that the Unnamed, despite all its powers, has limitations.”
“It can’t take the shape of the living, only the dead.”
“That’s a big one. So if it has a message for this world, it requires a messenger.”
“A disciple.”
“Something like that. A demon can’t go on TV and make a case on its own behalf any more than God can—or at least, neither have taken that route yet, as far as we know.”
“And it sees me as a potential spokesperson.”
“Why not? You’re legit. A Columbia prof, specializing in this stuff. Smart guy. No ties to the government, no means of personal profit. I’d choose you, too.”
I tell O’Brien about Professor Marco Ianno, the identity of the man in the chair. A man a lot like me.
“Maybe he was a candidate for the same job,” O’Brien concludes.
“The Unnamed took something from Ianno—maybe his daughter, his wife, his lover—and he went after them just like me. But in the end, he wouldn’t seal the deal.”
“Or the ride got too rough for him.”
“How do you mean?”
“Maybe all this—seeing ghosts, following signs, somebody hunting you down—maybe it’s a test. To see if you have the right stuff.”
“In the Old Testament, the Devil served God as a tester of man’s faith,” I say. “Kind of like the Heavenly Father’s sergeant-at-arms.”
“The Book of Job.”
“That would be the leading example, yes. A good man who endures loss and afflictions to see if he can withstand them, and in withstanding them, prove his love of God.”
“That’s some seriously tough love.”
“The point
of those stories, though, isn’t really about what Job or whoever puts up with. It’s not really even about faith. From a demonological perspective, it’s about Satan being taught a lesson, not the man.”
“And what’s the lesson?”
“That man can overcome evil through nothing more supernatural than love.”
“Okay. So you’re a new-century Job.”
“Except in this case, it’s not a plague of boils or the loss of my oxen and camels. It’s a test to see if I can go all the way to Tess without breaking.”
“And how do you think it’s going?”
“The body is weak—”
“—but the heart is strong.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s still beating. That’s about all I’m asking for.”
AFTER ANOTHER HALF HOUR OR SO, THE MORNING COFFEES WORK their magic and both of us need to pee. We pull over at the next rest stop, a cinderblock Men’s and Women’s set amid a grove of poplars. I finish before O’Brien and stand outside, waiting for her to come out, ready to take a shift at the wheel, when I hear the far-off sounds of struggle. The thud of limbs against tempered glass. A man’s fiercely whispered commands. A woman’s stifled screams.
The rest stop’s parking lot is narrow and long, a snakeskin of pavement designed to unobtrusively weave through the trees. It makes it hard to know where the sound is coming from, left or right. It’s a feeling more than a judgment that pulls me behind the washroom building to where the lot reaches into the bush and ends in an unoccupied clearing dotted with picnic tables. A sense that it is the old Dodge pickup, parked alone, where an assault is under way.
Even as I run the fifty yards between myself and the truck, the option of ignoring what I heard flirts with the front of my mind. Whatever is happening inside the Dodge stands a good chance of being a crime of some kind. And crimes require reporting, statements to police, the beginnings of a record. Crimes slow you down.
Though I have these thoughts, I don’t hesitate. Someone is being hurt. Something is being taken.
The sounds are more distinct when I stop a few feet from the truck. Grunts. Tight-throated yips. Starving animals warring over the last meat from the kill.
Whoever is inside hasn’t noticed my approach. It allows me to ease closer. Look in through the half-open passenger-side window.
A man and woman. The man older than she, judging from the striped button-down shirt he wears, the khaki slacks around his knees. The hair yielding to gray and in need of a cut, the trying-too-hard curls bouncing against the back of his neck. Beneath him, only the woman’s pale arms can be seen, a spray of copper hair over the bench seat. Her freckled hands clenching his back in pain or resistance or urging.
It is, at first, impossible to determine the existence of consent. The sounds they make rise now to hyena screeches, thoughtless and cruel. I was wrong earlier when I thought I’d heard words of command. There is no speech, nothing recognizably human at all. Their two bodies fused in agony.
I come close enough to place my hands on the edge of the open window. Something must be done now. To linger any longer makes me complicit somehow. A voyeur.
At the same instant I open my mouth to speak, I recognize who they are.
Hey.
They stop at the sound of my voice. It’s as though this is what they’ve been waiting for. Not the consummation of the act, because that’s not possible for them ever again. They are dead. And they are here only for me.
The man’s head turns without any motion from the rest of his body. His slicked face grinning at me over his shoulder in triumph.
“Poor David,” Will Junger says. “Can you even fuck that sick bitch riding with you now?”
I want to pull away, but my hands refuse to let go of the door. I have to stay long enough to hear what I need to hear.
Yet the next voice doesn’t come from Will Junger’s ashen lips, but the girl who slides her face out into view from under him. The hitchhiker. Raggedy Anne.
Live while ye may, Yet happy pair, she says. Shows her black-rooted teeth.
Now I let go. Ready to run. But the man who was once Will Junger begins to change, and I stay to see what he becomes. A subtle shift in the features of his face that doesn’t wholly turn him into something else but reveals the thing within him nevertheless.
“Who are you?”
The Unnamed answers in the same tone of false erudition it spoke with before. The words clearly formed, but brittle, inanimate.
Not to know me argues yourselves unknown.
I start to back away. But the Unnamed’s hand reaches out to grab mine. At the touch, thrumming pain passes through it and into me, electric and dizzying, a surge of distilled anguish. It’s a glimpse of the enormity of its loss that holds me more than its strength.
It says the same thing Will Junger said, in precisely the same voice, the last time I saw him on the steps of Low Library on a warm spring day at the end of term.
Gonna be a hot one.
Through his touch, he shows me Tess.
The real world—the rest stop lot, the weedy picnic area, the stand of poplars, the clearing sky—all of it blackens as though a velvet curtain had been pulled across a stage. Then, from out of the black, a figure steps forward. Her hands out in front of her, feeling for a way out. To fend off an attack.
Tess!
My shout comes from a thousand miles off. But she hears it. Hears me and runs—
The black curtain is pulled away to reveal the world again. And now I’m the one who’s running. Sidestepping away from the Dodge and then swinging around to lengthen my stride toward the Men’s and Women’s. Toward O’Brien, who is limping my way, shouting something I can’t hear.
When I reach her I put my arm around her, guiding her away from the truck. But she surprises me by the firmness of her stance.
“You see something?”
“In the pickup.”
She starts away. Her hips obviously sore, knees stiff. But still faster than you’d guess.
“Elaine!”
She makes it to the truck and immediately thrusts her head into the cab. Throws herself halfway in before she can see what’s waiting there.
Then I’m rushing up next to her, trying to pull her out. Not that I can see past her into the truck. Not that I can hear anything but O’Brien telling me to get my goddamn hands off her.
I let her go. And she comes sliding out to reveal an empty cab. Nothing on the bench but a crushed pack of cigarettes.
“They’re gone,” I say.
“I didn’t see anyone get out.”
“I don’t know how. But they were here. And now they’re not.”
“Just like that.”
“I didn’t ask you to look. In fact, I haven’t asked you for—”
“HEY! Who the hell are you?”
O’Brien and I both turn to face the speaker of this question. A middle-aged man in an undersized business suit emerging from the trees with a woman adjusting her skirt, gloss smeared outside the line of her lips. Both of them picking off the leaves that cling to their shirts and hair.
“We were—”
“What the mother do you think you’re doing in my truck?”
“Just checking on something,” O’Brien says.
“Yeah?”
“There were . . . sounds,” I add. “Coming from inside.”
“Sounds,” the man repeats, taking an unconscious step away from the glossy-faced woman, who appears undecided whether she has an urgent need to laugh or relieve herself.
“Hold on a second,” the man says. “Hold the fuck on. Do you work for my wife?”
“What?”
“She hire investigators or something?”
“No. No, no. This is all just a—”
“Bitch!”
O’Brien is already backing away. She hooks my elbow as she passes me, the two of us mouthing silent apologies. Then we turn and start as quickly away as a walking pace permits.
When we mak
e it to the Mustang I start to explain what I saw back at the truck, but O’Brien is already opening the passenger door and throwing herself in.
“Drive,” she says. “You can tell me without me worrying about some secretary screwer putting a bullet in my skinny ass.”
We slip back onto the interstate. Me checking the rearview for the Dodge, O’Brien checking e-mail and voice messages on her phone.
“You expecting a call?”
“A nervous tic,” she says. “I get anxious and start playing with the buttons on this thing.”
“That’s everybody’s nervous tic.”
O’Brien collects herself. Asks what I saw in the truck.
“Raggedy Anne. Remember the hitchhiker I told you about?”
“Yes. Unforgettable Anne. But she wasn’t alone, was she?”
“You’re not going to believe this.”
“It’s way too late for you to preface anything you might say with that.”
“Anne was doing the nasty with someone. A particularly nasty nasty.”
“I thought she was dead.”
“She is. And I got the distinct feeling the man she was with was, too.”
O’Brien is absorbed by her phone’s screen. Then she sniffs and sits straight. Eyes blazing with a kind of mad excitement.
“Tell me who it was,” she says.
“Will Junger.”
She makes a sucking intake of breath so sharp I take it to be a flare of pain.
“Let me ask you something,” she manages.
“Okay.”
“Have you checked your phone today?”
“No. Besides, I’ve been sitting beside you all day. Have you seen me check it?”
“No.”
“Why is this important?”
“That last e-mail I read came from Janice in the Psych Department at Columbia.”
“What’d it say?”
“A car accident. Just last night. Solo crash into a bridge abutment on the Long Island Expressway,” she says, sucking air again. “Will Junger died four hours ago, David.”
18
TWO PROFESSIONAL TALKERS ON A LONG DRIVE WITH STRANGE news swirling around their Ivy League noggins and neither O’Brien nor I say much more than “You hungry?” and “Any more Dr. Pepper?” between Denton, Texas, and Alexandria, Louisiana. We may be trying to figure things out. We may be in shock. We may be wondering if we will ever go home again. The only certainty is the road rolling out before us, indifferent and shimmering. Along with the sun that drills through the windows, licks of clammy air around our necks. We welcome the South with brooding silence and incremental bump-ups to the A/C.