Gatekeeper

by Alison Levy

  Thoughts of her family’s last celebration—the day Rettie, her nephew’s mother, joined their clan—drifted into Rachel’s mind. Rachel’s aunt had done all the cooking, filling the house with the rich scents of spiced goat meat and roasted potatoes. Her father had herded everyone who was lured to the stove by the appetizing smells out of the kitchen and kept them busy setting up borrowed tables, no two of which were the same size or shape, in the backyard. Guests had trickled in for hours, all wearing whatever clothes they had worn that morning, until the entire town was in attendance. Rettie had stood for the formal initiation on the back porch and then immediately walked ten feet to one of the tables and sat down to eat. A few of the neighbors had shown up with instruments and provided an impromptu concert that made everyone dance until the yard was nothing but mud. At the end of the party, everyone had taken home a portion of the leftover food.

  The memory made Rachel sigh. Just five more months until she could go home.

  The hubbub settled down a bit as the couple and their well-wishers headed into the dining hall. Emboldened by the quiet, Rachel put on her glasses, poked her face through the door, and looked around the room.

  An explosion of colors and visible vibrations assailed her eyes and made her head throb as she scanned her surroundings, but nothing looked out of place. There were daemons at the wedding, but that was normal; daemons gathered in any place where humans gathered. At a glance, she saw a petty theft daemon climbing a wall; two swirly joy-maker daemons springing from tabletop to tabletop, inspiring guests to dance and sing in delight; and a googly-eyed lust daemon whispering in the ear of a groomsman who was chatting up a pretty wedding guest. A few other daemons moved about the room, but all were behaving normally.

  Rachel removed the glasses, adjusted the shoulder strap of the carrier, and walked down the hall, away from the wedding venue. She made her way to the far end of the hallway, past a string of black-and-white photos tracing the history of the building, and took a seat near the entrance of a small, smoky bar.

  Now what? She sighed, closed her eyes, and rubbed her aching forehead. She would have to search the area more carefully. If only she knew for sure what she was looking for. As things stood now, she was working blind.

  Her phone buzzed. She checked and saw a text from Benny.

  You there?

  She smiled a little, feeling a touch of home reach out to her in this strange land.

  Still here, B, she wrote back. No mark yet.

  She pocketed the cell phone and tapped her fingers on the carrier. Where to look? Well, she could start with the bar and then the restrooms. After that, she would have to start trespassing in employee-only areas—something she hoped to avoid, since it increased the risk of exposure.

  Grumbling but resolute, she pulled the carrier’s shoulder strap into place and was about to stand up when she felt a tug on her pant leg. She looked down and was stunned to see a pile of dirty clothes at her feet. It appeared to be gripping the edge of her coat.

  She tried to pull away, but the heap clung to her and refused to be dislodged.

  “Uh . . . yeah?” she quietly asked, not sure what else to do.

  “Catch?” asked a small, raspy daemon voice.

  During Rachel’s training, one of her instructors had told her that “Catch” was a term daemons used in reference to humans sent to collect them, but until now she had never been addressed as such. Typically, daemons did not address people at all unless confronted. They simply weren’t wired that way; they were nothing but cogs in the cosmic machinery.

  Rachel glanced around. When she was confident that no one was paying attention, she leaned over. The pile of dirty clothes shrank away from her face but stayed rooted to the spot.

  “Yeah,” she said. “What are you?”

  The pile did not answer her. Rachel reached down and lifted the corner of a shirt from the top of the heap. At first, she saw nothing but a hollow area in the center of the pile, around which the clothes seemed to be suspended in midair. She put on her glasses and the picture immediately changed. Within the pile, she saw a large, protruding eye looking up at her. It was surrounded by a few visible patches of green skin. One large pointed ear—also green, with a pinkish tint on the inner rim—stuck out of the rags at an angle. The small hand gripping her pants was green and meaty, its three gnarled fingers tipped with pink-and-black claws.

  Rachel’s skin prickled at the clarity of the sight. Viewed through her glasses, most daemons looked just slightly out of focus, like objects in a watercolor painting, but this one was as clear as a photograph. It was wrong.

  “You’re a riot daemon,” she said.

  The daemon cocked its head at her like a dog hearing a distant whistle. “Catch hear?”

  Her skin prickled again. Just as daemons always looked a little out of focus, their voices always sounded a little distant. This daemon’s voice was too close to her, almost like a human voice. However, when it spoke, the words seemed to echo slightly, as if it were standing on the edge of a canyon. While its unnatural proximity to her made its voice clear, its words spilled downward into the gaping hole that its emergence into this world had created.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I understand you.” She yanked her sleeve from the daemon’s claws. “Do you realize that you’re physically affecting the human dimension?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you doing it on purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know you’re not supposed to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okaaaay.” The desultory conversation was beginning to irritate her. “So, why are you doing it?”

  “Think not well.”

  “You don’t ‘think’ you’re well?”

  “Yes.”

  The word twisted in her ear like a screwdriver. Think? Daemons were incapable of thinking. They tempted humans; that was all they could do, and they did it with the single-minded stalwartness of bees gathering nectar. But this daemon looked up at her through layers of dirt and discarded clothes, and she saw conflict in its bulging eye.

  “Stop work,” it said.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Not want.”

  “Want?” Rachel repeated in amazement. “You didn’t ‘want’ to tempt?”

  “Yes.”

  “You”—her eyes widened—“‘want’? How do you even know that word? You’re not supposed to want. You’re supposed to tempt people. You’re a daemon, that’s what you do.”

  “No want,” it unhappily insisted. “Want go. Go no fleshes.”

  “You ‘want’ to go someplace where there are no humans?”

  “Yes. Want.”

  Rachel could not have been more surprised if a toaster had asked for a cigarette. Staring blankly at the daemon’s big, confounded eye, she scratched her own arm, trying to prove to herself that she was not imagining this bizarre conversation. The daemon didn’t want to tempt people; in fact, it wanted to avoid humans altogether. Every word out of its mouth defied basic aspects of daemonic existence. Rachel pinched her eyes shut and shook her head. Her stomach was empty, and this strange conversation was making her head hurt. This was a fascinating case, and most likely somebody smarter than her was going to make a detailed study of it.

  “Daemon,” she said, “I’m going to take you in for correction.”

  It cocked its head at her and twitched its long ear.

  Guessing that it didn’t understand, she elaborated. “Correction will make you like you were before you started wanting things.”

  The daemon stood in silence for half a minute, its long, pointed ear twitching like a horse’s tail, its meaty fingers plucking at a button. At last, its colorless eye looked up at Rachel, and it made a bobbing motion from within the clothes.

  “Want go. No want want.”

  She squinted at the daemon. This job was too easy. She began to reach down, and it shrank away from her.

  “Covers?”

  “Covers? You mean
these clothes? Why are you wearing clothes?”

  “Want.”

  “Well, you can’t walk around in public like that,” Rachel said. “Someone’s gonna see you. Leave the clothes.”

  The clothing mound shuddered, and the three-fingered hand pulled the material tightly around its body.

  “No,” it said, a hint of surprise in its peculiar voice. “Want.”

  “I don’t care what you ‘want.’ You have to leave them.”

  “No.”

  “Fuck it all!” she said. “Fine. But pick one piece of clothing, just one. I’ll have to carry you. I can’t walk down the street with a shirt following me. I hope you’re smaller than you look.”

  Once the daemon had dropped its cumbersome heap and wrapped itself in an old, coffee-colored woman’s coat, Rachel hefted it up under one arm. It was, in fact, fairly small—barely one foot tall—but it was as solid as a brick and weighed about as much as a chubby toddler. If the confused creature would have stayed in the limited realm where daemons belonged, she could have carried it without feeling the weight, but it either couldn’t go back or didn’t “want” to, so she got the benefit of experiencing its full mass.

  Before she even made it outside, Rachel’s body ached from the strain. She wanted to drop the little green monster, but instead she trudged dutifully out of The Station, the carrier hanging from one shoulder and the abnormally heavy coat tucked under her other arm. Every few steps, her stomach growled like an ill-tempered watch dog, and her arm muscles muttered dark threats of soreness to come.

  All this for missing one meeting, she thought irritably.

  BACK AT THE Skiptrace office, Rachel deposited the carrier and the coat on the counter and then rattled off a quick summary of her evening to Creed as she brought out her phone and sent a text to her three colleagues. She was looking forward to telling them the story of this collection job, though she wondered if they would believe it—a daemon wearing a coat that wanted to be corrected. It was a little hard to swallow even for Rachel, who had experienced it firsthand.

  Creed, on the other hand, readily believed the story and, from the look on his face, found it fascinating. “A daemon that asks to be repaired,” he marveled. “That may be a first for this office.”

  Somewhere behind one of the hallway doors, Rachel heard muffled shouts, followed by a loud crash. Creed, seemingly oblivious to the unseen ruckus, took possession of the petty theft daemon in its carrier. The coat sat on the desk, rumpled and silent, as Creed set the carrier on the floor by his feet and then credited Rachel’s account with the two completed assignments. Rachel felt a wave of relief. Two jobs down, two to go. She just might finish up before the next assignment meeting after all.

  As she turned and headed back down the hallway, she heard a voice rise above the din.

  “Catch!”

  She stopped and glanced over her shoulder. From the countertop of the Skiptrace desk, one arm of the coat waved at her, the excess length of the sleeve hanging limply from the end of the daemon’s claws.

  “Good, Catch!”

  Rachel stared at the old coat, momentarily stunned. Then she smiled, laughed in bewilderment under her breath, and waved back at the daemon.

  “You’re welcome, Daemon.”

  ALL THE WAY back to the pocketed house, despite the dull headache that gripped her and the dread she felt for the work that awaited her, Rachel continued to chuckle quietly to herself. A daemon had thanked her for her help. It was going to make a great story to tell her family in her next message home. She pictured their reactions as she related the events of the evening. Her mother would shake her head and smirk when she heard about the pile of clothes the daemon had gathered around itself. Her brothers would laugh themselves silly at the creature’s strange talk. Her father would be fascinated at the idea of a daemon being self-aware enough to ask for correction. And her grandfather would raise his thin, gray eyebrows and cluck his tongue upon learning that it had actually thanked her for bringing it in. The story would give them conversation fodder for a while.

  At that thought, the smile on her face faded. They would talk about the story for weeks, but she wouldn’t be there to hear it.

  Rachel stepped into the shadow passage leading to the house and felt the darkness encompass her.

  4

  BURDEN

  Rachel was eating her second helping of eggs on toast when she heard a soft but persistent knock at the door. Her heart skipped a beat; she never got unannounced visitors.

  She hurried through the house, full of anxiety about the possibilities. When she reached the foyer, she took a deep breath and then threw open the door. There was a brief flash of color and movement at the shadow passage as someone exited the pocket dimension. Too late, Rachel opened her mouth to call out to them, but darkness swallowed the visitor before the first puff of breath left her lips.

  She heard a slight rustling sound and dropped her gaze to the source. Her brow furrowed at the sight of a rumpled old coat on her doorstep.

  “Daemon?” she asked in disbelief.

  The woman’s coat quivered and lifted itself up. Under the porch, the stray dog’s glowing eyes peered up through the cracks in the wood at the uninvited creature standing just a few feet from its den. It growled.

  “Catch,” said the riot daemon from inside the coat.

  Rachel darted back into the house for her glasses. She put them on as she returned to the doorway, and saw one bulbous eye staring up at her from within the folds of the old coat. She huffed and wrinkled her nose. “What are you doing here? I submitted you for correction.”

  The creature stood in silence, plucking at a button on the coat with its pink-and-black claws.

  Rachel was reaching for her phone to contact the Skip-trace office when an angry rumble sounded overhead. Thoughts of the leaky roof pecked at her mind, overriding her discomfort with the creature’s presence.

  “Get inside, Daemon,” she said, stepping aside to clear a path. “It’s about to rain.”

  The daemon obediently shuffled across the threshold and into the foyer. Rachel closed the door behind it as she checked the Skiptrace Department’s master board on her phone.

  There was a message under her name, one she hadn’t seen when last she checked. The message was headed with the emblem of the Central Office.

  “To: Wilde Rachel len Wilde,” she read aloud, “daemon collector, natural-born citizen of the Arcana, granddaughter of Wilde Brom who is Head of the Clan Wilde in the town of Kritt in the Plains Region of the Northern Arcanum. Subject: riot daemon. Ms. Wilde, the riot daemon you recently brought in for correction is too badly damaged to repair. We have made some inquiries to see if another office is better equipped to make repairs of this magnitude. However, as we suspected, the only people who are possibly qualified for this work are currently in the Arcana. As you well know, we cannot ship this daemon to the Arcana for correction as long as the interdimensional passages are sealed during the yearlong systems check. At the moment, we have too much work on hand to spare any more time and effort on this one case. Since this daemon’s defect is relatively benign, there is no need to keep it locked up in your local Skiptrace office, where it takes up much-needed space. However, it would be irresponsible of this department to turn a defective daemon loose. Since you possess the rare ability to understand what it says, we are placing the daemon in your house until the gates to the Arcana reopen or until this office finds time to reexamine the case, whichever might come first. In the meantime, keep an eye on the daemon to be sure its defect does not worsen. So long as it refuses to tempt anyone and does not otherwise influence the human world, it can be safely ignored. Your continued service is appreciated. Many thanks, Central Office of Daemonic Monitoring.”

  She scanned the message a second time, her nostrils flared. They were placing a busted daemon in her care? She had never heard of such a thing!

  “Whose dumbass idea was this?”

  The moment she asked the question, sh
e knew the answer was irrelevant. Good idea or bad, she really didn’t have a choice. If she refused to let the daemon live in the house, the Arcanan authorities could toss her out of this crumbling heap —or, worse, inform her family on the other side of the gates of her disobedience. Her elder brother was not on good terms with the neighbors (hadn’t been ever since he told the Kritt Council Speaker to shove her opinions up her ass); her little sister was institutionalized due to her need for specialized care; and her other brother had his hands full furthering his education and raising a child. Her parents had seemed to be doing fine when last she heard from them, but her grandfather had a bad leg and couldn’t do any heavy lifting. Her causing trouble for the Central Office wouldn’t make anyone’s life easier. Given the circumstances, she couldn’t afford to be selfish. The daemon would have to stay.

  “So,” she said, “what do I do with you now?”

  “Do with?”

  “Do you . . . need a room or something?”

  “Room or?”

  “Yeah, a room. Do you need a place to sleep or do you need something to eat?”

  “To eat?”

  Thoughts of her unfinished breakfast overrode her patience.

  “Daemon,” she snapped. “I need you to be a little smarter, okay? When I ask you a question, I need you to answer. Don’t repeat what I said, just answer.” She caught her next sharply worded sentence just as it reached her tongue and shut her mouth. “Temper gets the better of you, Rachel,” she heard her father say. As he had taught her to do, she shook her head slowly while she reined in her ire.

  “See,” she began again, her voice level this time, “here’s the thing: I don’t have a lot of experience with daemons that doesn’t involve me catching them and delivering them for correction. I don’t really know what daemons do when they’re not tempting people. Help me out, okay?”