The Devil You Know

by Richard Levesque

  The problem was that she knew something else had begun to happen to her. It had started as a vague feeling that something was not right. The lost moments after he left her and the dark, disturbing dreams that haunted her had increased in duration and intensity over the week that she’d been playing this dangerous game. She had begun to see something in her dreams—a hazy, dark shape at the edge of her consciousness that waited for her. Over the last two days, she’d begun to sense it during her waking hours as well, which told her it was closer and stronger. It would devour her; she was certain of it. Though it petrified her, she also wanted it, longing for the blackness to swallow her up. Yet she knew at the same that if it took her, it would take her soul as well. She would burn in hell.

  There was no saving herself, and no one to do it for her. She had come upon the only solution this morning, and it was still not an acceptable one. Even so, if she was going to offend God, it was probably better to do it this way, to finish with one last mortal sin rather than pile up dozens more on her way to the inevitable.

  She made the sign of the cross and wished she could find her rosary. It might burn her lips to kiss the crucifix, but she wanted to do it anyway. It was nowhere among her things, though. She had no memory of what had happened to it, no way of knowing that she had gotten out of bed two nights earlier and gone out onto the grounds still in her sleep to bury the rosary in Mr. Piedmont’s lawn along with her scapular and prayer book.

  Trying to pray, she could think of nothing but the times she’d been with the man who looked so much like Errol Flynn. They had never exchanged more than whispers and grunts; she hadn’t even learned his name. Instead, she had learned to respond to his touch and to read the glances and smirks he gave her when others were around so she would know where to wait for him—here in the servants’ quarters, in one of the main house’s vacant bedrooms, even in the back seat of Old Mr. Piedmont’s limousine parked in the dark garage.

  Everything had changed when the old jefe had died. Young Mr. Piedmont had brought along all his boyish followers, and all the drinking and women—and the five strange men who looked so gorgeous and so dangerous at the same time. Julian Piedmont was what Catalina’s father would have called hijo de la chingada. But now Catalina was la chingada herself—the whore.

  Thinking of her father brought her back to the letter that would end up in her parents’ mailbox by tomorrow. It was part apology and part farewell, and though she knew it would be little consolation, it was all she had left to offer. The little house on the other side of the Los Angeles River would be filled with mourners soon enough, and Catalina’s letter would be passed around by all the relatives and neighbors, who would just shake their heads and cross themselves while wiping away their tears.

  When she had finished trying to pray, she did not bother to make the sign of the cross again, but rather stood up and walked toward the simple wooden chair she had placed in the middle of the room. Smoothing her black maid’s uniform, she took a deep breath and climbed onto the chair. The rope had come from the garage; it was old but thick, and it looked sturdy enough. There was no question about the strength of the beam she had looped it around. She placed the noose over her head and tightened the knot against her neck. Then, without asking forgiveness or making any more entreaties, she lifted one foot to the back of the chair, balanced there for a second, and kicked it out from under her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Monday at St. Lucy’s was essentially business as usual. Father Joe had letters for Marie to go through, others for her to type, accounts to be balanced, and calls to be made. She performed as always, but thoughts of Tom and Elise and Julian Piedmont’s handsome monsters were never far away.

  At ten o’clock, Father Joe walked into the outer office after having been at his desk for some time with his door closed. He passed by her desk on his way out. It was his habit to get a cup of coffee around ten and take a walk around the church grounds. He usually went with a quiet word or two, but today he stopped at the door and gave Marie a searching look.

  “That friend of yours that was sick,” he said. “How is she?”

  Startled at the question, it took Marie a moment to answer. “Not well,” she said. “Not at all.” His question and the look on his face had left her momentarily flustered.

  Father Joe looked at her, nodding his head with some concern. Then he said, “And you? Getting enough sleep and all? Not letting her problems tear you down, I hope.”

  “No,” she said, trying not to let her confusion show. Father Joe was always kindly to her, and in the first few months that she had worked for him, he had taken special care to offer counseling in getting through the ordeal of being a new, young widow. But since then, he had kept out of her business, contenting himself with pleasant conversation of very little substance. This concern for her and the situation with Elise struck Marie as extremely odd, especially as it came a week after the only other time she had mentioned Elise. Where did this come from? she asked herself. “Just trying to be a good friend to her, but I don’t think there’s much that can be done.”

  “You can pray, of course.”

  “Oh, I have been,” she said with a forced smile.

  “Good girl,” he said, returning her smile. The piercing gaze he had fixed her with upon starting the conversation faded as he smiled. Unsettled, she felt as though he had transformed for a few minutes and was now back to his normal self. As if to confirm her feelings, he slipped back into the casual manner that he always addressed her with, nodding at her as he said, “Be back in a bit.”

  She had been waiting for him to leave the office so she could use the phone, but instead of reaching for the receiver she simply sat at her desk for a few minutes trying to make sense of what had just passed between herself and the priest. After a few minutes she could do no more than shake her head and tell herself to forget it.

  After driving back to Hollywood the night before, she had talked with Tom and Jasper about the next best step to take in dealing with the incubi. Jasper agreed with her that something must be done and that they were on their own in doing it. The police would be of no help, nor was it likely that anyone in the clergy would take their claims seriously enough to attempt some sort of exorcism on the demons. And even if they could get such assistance, Julian Piedmont would never consent to such a thing. Furthermore, if the demons could be dispatched, there was still the problem of the book of spells. In the face of such difficulties, Jasper had suggested that Marie try to contact Colin Krebs to see if he could provide any more information.

  With Father Joe safely out of the office for the next fifteen minutes, Marie slipped Colin’s calling card from her wallet. Listening carefully for any sign that the priest might be returning, she lifted the telephone’s receiver from its cradle and dialed the phone number on the card. Her heart began to pound the moment she picked up the phone, both out of fear that Father Joe would return and that any information she might get from Colin would be bad. She had not spoken to Colin since last Monday night when she had phoned him from the hospital. For all she knew, Julian had coerced him into conjuring more demons since then. Having five incubi to deal with was one thing, she told herself, but if Hollywood was swarming with these things, there would be no way that she and Jasper and Tom could do anything at all. It would be best to pack up and move to Iowa, and wait for the army of incubi to prove that all of the preachers and nay-sayers who had been damning Hollywood for the last twenty-five years had been right all along.

  Colin answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?” he said, the word coming across as a question whose answer he was not looking forward to.

  “Colin, it’s Marie Doyle,” she said.

  “Marie…my God,” he responded before she could say any more. She had been thinking it would be necessary to remind him of whom she was, but that apparently was not the case. “I didn’t think you’d call again.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to, but I wanted to see if I could get more information fr
om you about what’s been going on.”

  “I talked to your priest,” he said, ignoring her request.

  Immediately, Marie thought of how strangely Father Joe had been acting. “What did you tell him?” she asked sharply. “About me, I mean.”

  “Nothing.” He said it quickly, but Marie couldn’t tell if he was lying. “I just told him what happened with Julian, with the book. And since.”

  “And nothing about me or Elise. Nothing about the party?”

  “No,” Colin confirmed. “Nothing.”

  Marie took a deep breath. In her conversations with Jasper over the last several days, he had remained adamant that the church should not be involved in whatever plan they came up with, and Marie had agreed that Father Joe should not be let in as a conspirator. Now, he seemed to have found out about the incubi regardless. “You told him everything else, though?” she asked. “About the incubi and what they’re doing?”

  “All of it.”

  “And he believed you?”

  Colin hesitated before answering. “I can’t tell. He may just be trying to humor me. It doesn’t matter, though. He gave me absolution.” He said the last with real joy.

  She found this surprising. Absolution was not a thing to be taken lightly or given frivolously. If Father Joe had even considered that Colin was fabricating his story, he would never have absolved him of his sins. In a flash, she thought first of how unlikely such credulity would be for Father Joe, especially given his reaction to Marie’s questions about incubi. And then, once she remembered asking him, she realized that Father Joe must have made a connection between her inquiries and Colin’s confession; he must have figured out that Marie was involved to at least some degree. His questions about Elise this morning had been his way of indirectly determining just how involved she was, probably out of a desire to keep her soul out of jeopardy, and nothing more. Listening to Colin, she decided that if Father Joe asked directly about the incubi, she would tell him what she knew; if he kept quiet, she would follow Jasper’s wishes and not involve the priest at all.

  She tried to put the thought out of her mind and returned to the real reason she had phoned Colin. “Listen, Colin. Are those things still as active as they were last week?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Are you still helping them? And Piedmont?”

  “I’ve tried to stop, but he insists. He says he needs us all now. Father Joe says I should just leave for San Francisco or something, but I don’t know.”

  “Has he had you make any more?”

  “Julian? No. Not yet. At least, not any new demons.”

  Marie looked at her wristwatch, wondering how much time remained before Father Joe returned. She bit at a thumbnail and pressed on. “What do you mean?”

  “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. Especially not on the phone.”

  “Well, I can’t come meet you, Colin,” she said sharply, her ire rising. “And I need to know what’s going on. You owe me, Colin. You owe all those women whose lives you’ve ruined. If anyone else is on the line, they won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. All right?”

  There was a moment’s silence on the line. “Okay, okay. One of the…bodies got destroyed. We had to make another one.”

  “What happened?”

  She heard Colin sigh, and then he went on. “One of them picked up a married woman. The husband came in when they were…you know. He had a gun. The body was…well, without the demon in them, there’s not much substance to them.”

  “Wait,” said Marie. She tried to recall what she had learned about incubi from Jasper’s books and how this new information fit into the mythology. “Are you saying the incubus left the body after it got shot? Or did it flee because it was going to get shot?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t want to know.” He paused, breathing hard now. When he continued, he sounded close to panic. “All I know…is we had to make another one. Oh God, Marie. It was awful.”

  Marie wished their meeting had been face to face. It would be too easy for him to hang up and not take her call again if she tried back.

  Trying to calm him and show that she was on his side, she said, “I’m sorry you had to go through that, Colin.” She could not tell for sure, but she thought he might be weeping now, and she decided to try and sway his loyalty to Julian. “You know it will probably happen again, though, don’t you?”

  “Oh God! I can’t!”

  “Colin. Colin,” she said firmly, hoping to keep him focused on her voice. “You don’t have to. You know that. If you can’t leave Julian the way Father Joe said, then you can stop him instead.”

  “How?”

  She hesitated a moment. “Destroy the book.” Though she felt urgency, she struggled to keep her voice steady and to speak directly, as though she were asking Colin to do something extremely simple. “Just throw it in the fire.”

  “No. Julian keeps it now. It’s not out on the shelf anymore; he’s got it locked up.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance he’d destroy the book himself? And the demons? Just give it all up?”

  “If only,” Colin said. “He won’t—It’s done something to him. You should see him. The power he has over them. The fact that they keep coming back to him, to his house. It’s like he’s become their god or something. He loves it. It scares me, Marie. I just know he’s going to want more soon. These aren’t enough for him anymore.”

  “Okay, Colin. Okay.” Marie took a deep breath. “Maybe you should just do what Father Joe said. Just pack a bag and go away. Leave in the middle of the night.”

  “He’ll know. He’ll send them after me.”

  “He won’t, Colin. They’re after women. They’re not detectives.”

  “Then he’ll hire detectives and he’ll send something else after me. Something that doesn’t want women. Something that’ll…take me.”

  “Where? Back to Los Angeles?”

  “To hell.”

  “Colin, that’s just fear talking. You won’t—”

  He interrupted her, speaking calmly and quietly now. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Marie. Please be careful. Don’t let yourself get any further in. Your friend may as well be gone. You’d best forget about saving her. And all the rest of them. You’d best forget all of it.”

  The line clicked, and he was gone. Marie put the phone back in its cradle, wishing desperately for a cigarette. Father Joe did not approve of her smoking, though, and she would have to put the thought out of her mind.

  Taking a deep breath, she looked at her watch and decided she should risk one more call. She dialed the bookstore, and when Jasper answered, she said, “I talked to Colin.”

  “Yes?”

  “He can’t get the book.”

  “Well then,” Jasper said. She could imagine his sly smile as he sat behind the counter at the store. “We’ll just have to go get it ourselves, won’t we?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Julian Piedmont floated on his back and smiled at the irony of it all: an actor so good at his role that no one ever guesses he’s acting, and he ends up running the whole studio, telling the actors, directors and producers what to do. Julian’s acting had nothing to do with film crews or lighting, though; the role he played was on a bigger stage, and he had mastered it long ago. He was the life of the party, the one who knew where to find the best liquor and the easiest women. He told the best jokes and knew how to make sure everyone laughed at them. He was the hub, the center, the gravity that held together every social scene he had commandeered since boarding school. Best of all, he had learned how to make anyone near him want so badly to stay around and to fear exclusion so desperately that they would work to please him at any cost. None of them had ever known that he was just a scared boy who needed to be liked and had gone about getting approval the only way that worked. His father had been the only one he’d never been able to fool, and with the old man dead now, Julian finally had everything he’d ever wanted.

  And
now, this. He took a deep breath and let his stomach drop, folding his body at his hips and feeling the water close around his head as he sank below the surface. His eyes open underwater, he looked across the pool to see Dick Sheridan’s legs kicking toward the far edge. There was a time when the pool would have had at least one woman in it for each of the men, but now Julian had needed to impose a strict “roosters only” policy. He had thought he’d had things well enough under control at the house until the little maid had turned up at the end of a rope yesterday morning. Now he knew the incubi were not to be trusted; he’d been a fool to think he could control them so thoroughly. For years, he’d been used to everyone kowtowing to him, and he’d grown complacent to the point of assuming the demons were just as subservient. They acted reverentially enough toward him, after all, doing as he said, taking on the faces and personalities he assigned them, chasing after the skirts he said were best and leaving alone the ones he forbade. But they weren’t lanky frat boys or pouty-lipped ingénues hopeful for a break in the business. They were demons from hell—from fucking hell, he told himself—and they were loyal to him only to the degree that it served their needs. And now that one of them had driven the maid to suicide—and had done so with impunity—there was no telling in what other ways they would start to assert themselves.