Gatekeeper

by Alison Levy

  Swallowing her concern, she forced a smile, nodded at Miss Morley, and quietly slipped out the door. All the way down the hall, she let her eyes drift aimlessly over the long line of office doors, inhaling the dusty scent of book binding and printer ink, as her worries whispered in her ear like the sickly sweet temptations of an unseen daemon.

  10

  COINCIDENCE

  Bach kept a respectful distance from the slinking brown coat as he watched it creep around the house. Curious though he was, the sight of a coat that moved all on its own dredged up a primitive fear in him that froze his feet to the floor every time he tried to edge his way closer. The only time it passed close to him (it appeared around a corner unexpectedly, causing Bach to jump backward), he snuck a glimpse down the open neck hole. There was nothing inside. The coat was moving as if suspended in midair by a puppeteer’s strings. At this revelation, all of Bach’s hair stood on end and his heart leapt like a rabbit that’s just heard a hawk’s hungry shriek. From that moment on, he was ever vigilant, intent on making sure the coat did not catch him unaware. He followed it and watched it and tried not to think too hard about what was making it move.

  Rachel arrived home close to five o’clock with her eyes full of thought. Much to Bach’s surprise, she walked right past the shuffling coat without so much as a glance, yet she shot a brief glare in his direction. She seemed less concerned with the coat’s presence than she was with his.

  “You’re still here?” she mumbled.

  His stomach lurched at her irritated tone. “Well,” he said quietly, “I have nowhere else to go.”

  She looked him up and down. There was a strange mix of intensity and detachment in her face, as if she was a scientist studying a specimen. Bach shifted his weight, uncertain of his place in her home and fearful of returning to the larger world, where the only roof over his head was a rusted bridge. Rachel took off her jacket and tossed it over the banister. Then she brushed past Bach and headed for the kitchen.

  “You can’t stay here forever,” she said over her shoulder. “You’re Notan. This is an Arcanan house. You don’t belong here.”

  Bach started after her, but the coat drifted across the kitchen threshold, blocking his path. He stared at it, silently willing it to move, but instead it settled down, its fabric crumpling like a balloon losing half its air. With one hand on the doorframe and his feet firmly planted, Bach leaned as far inside the kitchen as he could without making contact with the thing. From where he was, he couldn’t see Rachel, but he could hear her moving around.

  “How long will you let me stay?” he called out.

  He heard her take a long, deep breath. The refrigerator door opened and then closed. There was a soft clatter as dishes and silverware were moved around. He waited, holding his breath so as not to miss a sound.

  “I don’t know,” she finally groaned. “I don’t wanna think about it right now. Are you hungry?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “I’m making burgers. Want one?”

  The mention of food made his mouth water like a busted faucet. With his sanity only recently returned, he couldn’t remember when he had eaten last, but he knew his stomach was painfully empty. Fear of the future persisted in his mind, but his famished body demanded that he let it take precedence.

  “Sounds great. Thanks.”

  The coat stirred. Hoping it would move just a foot or two so he could squeeze by, Bach started to inch forward, but when the coat turned in a circle and settled back into the same spot, he stopped cold. He accidentally peered down the neck again and quickly whipped his gaze away when confronted with the empty space inside.

  His stomach growled insistently. Though he was still disturbed by the coat’s presence, the promise of food overran his fear. Very gingerly, he lifted one leg, stepped over the motionless coat, and eased his other leg over. Then he walked backward into the kitchen, eyes locked on the coat. It didn’t budge.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s with the coat?”

  “Huh?” Rachel glanced at him and then the threshold, and seemed to notice the old piece of clothing for the first time. “Oh, that. It’s a daemon.”

  His heart skipped a beat. “The coat is a demon?”

  Rachel laughed aloud. The purity of the sound surprised him. Somehow, he had startled her into a moment of genuine happiness. For the first time since returning home, she looked him in the eye.

  “No.” She was still laughing. “The daemon is wearing the coat.”

  “‘Wearing’? But there’s nothing inside. I looked.”

  “You can’t see daemons with your naked eye. Well,” she qualified, “some people can, but that’s not a talent anyone would want. Most of those people are pretty messed up.”

  “Messed up how?”

  “Like you under the bridge,” she said, her eyes piercing him with their severity, “but much worse.”

  It was a sobering thought. Of all the homeless folks who’d made their homes under the bridge, Bach had easily been the craziest of the crazies. The rest of the population, even those suffering from their own delusions, had walked a wide circle around him like he was a bristling porcupine. The idea of someone being in worse shape than that was difficult to grasp.

  “You can’t see them either, right?” He glanced at the coat and thought of the emptiness it contained. “Then how do you catch them?”

  “Here.” She handed him a mixing bowl. “Mix up the beef, egg, and all that stuff. I’ll be back in just a second.”

  The rich aroma of meat and herbs filled his nose and set his stomach gurgling. He plunged his hands into the bowl and mashed the ingredients together, listening to the sound of Rachel’s retreating footsteps. The beef mixture was bitingly cold—his fingers grew numb within seconds of contact—but his heart warmed as he worked. The feel and the scent stirred memories of assisting his grandmother before Fourth of July cookouts. He smiled at the thought of her and heard her kind voice in his ear as he separated the mix into four patties. Every thought of her brought a muddle of nostalgia, love, and grief, but he never shied away from the memories. They were all he had of her, and he loved every single one.

  Once finished with the meat, he immediately turned on the kitchen sink to as hot as the water would get and scrubbed away the frigid pain in his fingers. Even as he washed away the mush on his skin, the scent was so enticing that he was sorely tempted to eat the burgers raw. He looked down at the clothes hanging limply from his wasted body. Before his breakdown, the shirt and jeans would have fit him perfectly, but that was six months and almost forty pounds ago. A shower, shave, and some clean clothes may have returned him to the world of the living, but the road to recovery still stretched into the distance.

  Rachel returned as he was drying his hands, a pair of glasses in her hand. His brows furrowed into a question mark.

  “Put these on,” she said, “and then go look at the coat. Just don’t be freaked out.”

  He accepted the glasses but didn’t put them on right away. Instead, he turned them over in his hands, feeling the smooth metal, plastic, and glass with his fingertips. They appeared ordinary except for an eerie glimmer on the lenses, something like the reflection of a rainbow on cloudy ice. He glanced over Rachel’s shoulder, to where he had last seen the coat, and narrowed his blue eyes with suspicion. It was gone.

  Rachel followed his gaze. “I think it’s in the living room,” she said.

  Before Bach could ask the question stirring behind his lips, she answered it unbidden.

  “It won’t hurt you. It’s defective, but its defect makes it more or less harmless.”

  Still, he hesitated.

  “Go on,” she urged. “Go check it out.”

  Regardless of her assurances, the thought of the vacant yet mobile coat still prickled the animal fear in Bach’s chest. When he made no move to leave the kitchen, Rachel rolled her eyes and hooked her hand under his elbow. With a little tugging, he finally walked with her.

  She led him to th
e foyer and then on to the living room. “Daemon! Come over here and stay close to me! Let my guest have a look at you.”

  The old brown coat appeared from behind an armchair and waddled in her direction, the ends of its sleeves dragging in its wake. Panic exploded in Bach’s blood, but Rachel’s hand on his elbow anchored him to the spot.

  The thing wearing the coat came to a stop at his feet and stood still. Bach turned his head every which way to avoid looking down the center of the garment again; knowing there was an invisible creature there didn’t make the empty spot less horrible.

  “Put the glasses on,” Rachel instructed him, but he could barely hear her over his own racing heartbeat.

  Very slowly, and only after several nudges from her, he closed his eyes, unfolded the glasses, and squeezed them onto his face. A demon, he thought, his mind racing. Am I really going to look at a demon?

  Once the glasses were on, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

  The room was afloat with swirling colors, ghostly blips, and fractals that floated and drifted on air currents he could not feel. A sudden puff of breath from his lips sent the nearest bunch spiraling away, causing him to jerk back in astonishment. The air was so full of outlandish patterns and smudged colors, it seemed thick in a way he could almost taste. He swiped at the closest snowflake-like pattern, and his fingers passed through the thing without resistance. But it also smeared slightly from the contact, like paint under a brush. As Bach watched, it steadily drew itself back together into a similar but not identical shape, even as it moved very slowly in the direction he had swept his hand. Its color fluctuated gradually from crystal green to neon yellow and then, as it intersected with a snakelike wisp of blue, it transformed into a crimson sphere. It was alien but beautiful, fragile but enduring. It filled his eyes and occupied all his thought.

  It was suffocating.

  Bach’s legs began to shake and his breath grew choppy. Behind the glasses, his blue eyes grew wide and began to twitch. Inside his head, the newly restored order that was keeping his sight-beyond from cluttering his mind was rapidly breaking down. The information his strange gift made available to him was shaking loose from the recesses where it was housed, interrupting his regular thought process. He became light-headed and swayed.

  Rachel grabbed his arm and lunged for the glasses, but not in time. Bach collapsed to the floor, landing on the area rug with a thud that spewed a cloud of dust into the living room air.

  In the last seconds before losing consciousness, he caught a glimpse of the coat through the lenses. From within its folds, a long, pointed, green ear stuck out at an angle and one big, bulging eye with no iris stared at him with naked disinterest.

  BACH AWOKE WITH a dull headache and a pain in his shoulder from where he had struck the floor. He opened his eyes to a blaze of lamplight that stung him like a slap to the face. The glasses were gone; the bizarre fractals and crystalline shapes were nowhere to be seen. Order was quickly being restored to his mind. Still, he didn’t seem to have recovered his balance yet; the floor seemed to slant one way or another as he tried to move.

  The adrenaline gradually drained out of his muscles, but his body still shook from its presence. When he pushed himself up, trembling, Rachel grabbed his shoulder and held him still.

  “Stay where you are,” she said. “You’ve been seizing again. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “What the hell happened?”

  “I screwed up,” she said, an unspoken apology on her face. “They told me during my training that oracles are unfit to be daemon collectors, but I never understood why. I guess I know now. Makes sense.” She helped him rise slowly to his feet. “An oracle’s brain is wired differently than the average person’s.”

  Though he heard her words, they sounded a little strange to his recovering ears, almost as if she had slipped into another language. Struggling to comprehend what she was saying, he pressed one hand to his face, breathed deep, and tried to focus.

  “What?”

  “You see the world in a different way,” she explained. “Your senses are tuned to a slightly different frequency and your brain stores information differently.”

  As the effects of the seizure faded and reality became crisper, Bach was able to wrap his mind around her words and grasp their meaning.

  “So . . . I couldn’t use the glasses . . . because I’m different.”

  “Yes. You shouldn’t use anything that alters your perception. You’ll wind up frying your mind.”

  “My ‘different’ mind.”

  “Right.” She smiled meekly, loose strands of her dark brown hair falling across her small face, and shrugged. “My fault. I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes reflected the truth of her words, and Bach took them to heart. It was just an accident. Balance returned to him and he straightened up. His shoulder still hurt a bit, but his headache was already gone. Realizing that he had just seen something most people would never even know existed, he decided the lingering pain was worth it.

  “It’s all right. I’m kinda glad I got to see the demon.” He glanced around as they made their way back through the house to the kitchen. He didn’t see the coat. “Where is it?”

  “Wandered away. It does that.”

  “Yeah.” A thought occurred and Bach fixed Rachel in a worried squint. “He’s not gonna watch me while I sleep or anything, is he?”

  “‘It,’” she corrected, “not ‘he.’ And no, it won’t.”

  “The demon’s not a he?”

  “Ninety-nine percent of daemons are sexless, and the ones that have a sex . . .” She raised one eyebrow. “Well, let’s just say it’s very obvious. Anyway, that’s a riot daemon. All riot daemons are sexless.”

  Bach took a seat at the kitchen table and let the last little tears in his sanity knit themselves back together while Rachel fired up the stovetop and got the burgers cooking. He enjoyed the faint flow of heat through the coolness of the house, as well as the delightful smell of the cooking meat.

  “You pronounce the word demon strangely,” he said. “Is that a second-language slipup?”

  “No,” she said through the smoke rising from the pan. “They’re two different words. A daemon—there’s an a before the e—is a type of creature that tempts human beings to act in a particular way via subconscious whispers. All types of daemons break down now and then.”

  “Who put you guys in charge of the demons—sorry, daemons?” he asked. “Was it God?”

  “You think I’m a divine messenger?” she scoffed. She glanced up from the burgers with a flat expression. “You’re not much of an oracle if you do.”

  “But how do your people even know about daemons?” he pressed. “Who discovered them?”

  “I don’t know who discovered them,” she said. “Knowledge of daemons actually came to us from another, older dimension.”

  “Older . . .” Bach’s eyes widened like a gaping mouth, striving to swallow this information. “How old?”

  “Um . . .” Rachel checked the underside of one meat patty. “Very old. See, the Arcana has been around since before recorded Notan history. Our current social structure, including daemon monitoring, was established tens of thousands of years ago when some refugees from an older, decaying human dimension joined our world. Using the knowledge we gained from them, daemon monitoring became part of the fabric of our society. It’s . . . it’s just the way things are.”

  Just the way things are. Like an adult casually justifying table manners to a child.

  “You’ve spent your whole life keeping this world—the, uh . . . the Nota world—running smoothly just because ‘it’s the way things are’?” He shook his head, dumbfounded. “That’s all?”

  “That’s the life I was born into,” she replied simply.

  “So you’re cool with it?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head again and ran his hands through his hair. Daemons, different dimensions, glasses that showed the wearer outrageous
wonders—it boggled his mind that she was so numb to it all.

  “I think that’s weird.”

  She flipped the burgers. The meat sizzled. “I think it’s weird that you think it’s weird.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” she snapped, startling him. “Know what else I think is weird? I think it’s weird that you live your whole life as a citizen of a country that goes to war with other countries despite the fact that you all share the same world. I think it’s weird that you pay people to govern you. I think it’s weird that you let a handful of people live in obscene excess while thousands of others starve. I think it’s weird that you deny education and medical treatment to people based solely on their inability to pay for it. I think it’s weird that you use energy sources that you know are making your water undrinkable and your air unbreathable. I think it’s weird that you accumulate so much garbage that you have to have it hauled away on a weekly basis so it can rot in a landfill. And you know what I really think is weird, Bach?” She pointed the spatula at him, jabbing for emphasis. “Manicured lawns. You people pay money for a home with land around it, and then you use the land to grow nothing but grass, which you then cut short as soon as it grows. What is the point of having land if you’re not going to grow something useful on it? At the very least, let the grass grow and get some sheep to trim it for you. Sheep have a dozen uses! Grass, not so much.” She wrinkled her nose as if the meat had suddenly started to stink. “You people make no fucking sense.”

  Bach stared at her in stunned silence and tried to absorb the impact of the culture clash that had just slammed into him. Since meeting her, he had known at least superficially that Rachel was from a faraway place; but she looked and sounded and acted like any other person he might meet, so up until this point he had not given her origins much thought. As he looked at her now, in the wake of her outburst, he saw something different. The clothes she wore (jeans and a long-sleeve top) looked conventional enough, but, upon closer inspection, they lacked distinctive logos and tags. She wore no obvious makeup, and, unlike most women he knew, she made no effort to keep her fingernails manicured. She wore no jewelry other than a wristwatch, and her earlobes were unpierced. She looked and sounded and acted like the average person, but that, he now realized, was because she had been trained to do those things; she had been taught, extensively, not to stand out. The place she came from must not be at all like the world he had grown up in. My God, he suddenly thought. How homesick she must be.