Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction

by Richard Bowes

  See me, darling Katie Ann. Come to Beaumont. There isn’t a thing your Aunt Joelee can do about it now.

  Yours,

  Bez

  In August, in the same booth she always occupied when visiting Bez—second from last, number 7—during the brief minutes before he was brought in, shackled like a circus lion, Katie Ann’s water broke.

  It took another woman to assess the situation—an older Hispanic lady visiting her son, who spoke first in Spanish before switching to accented English: “She have a baby.”

  Bez appeared behind the glass and threw himself up against it, his eyes bright and perfect teeth glinting in the fluorescent light. His breath fogged the glass before a guard yanked him back. Katie Ann moaned; she felt fear mounting inside her until her eyes met Bez’s and he laughed and the room became unbearably bright.

  She was no longer afraid. Any moment Bez was going to become a father.

  Her angel was going to be a daddy.

  Katie Ann smiled and she cried. And then, when the pain struck her like a white-hot poker in the abdomen, the whole of the visitation room was swallowed up by total whiteness.

  “Go outside now.”

  The girl stood still for a second, then glanced down at her bare feet on the blood-stained carpet.

  Bez said, “It won’t be cold long. You’ll be all right.”

  He was right. Bez was always right, and he always told the truth.

  Katie Ann went outside, careful to stay on the walkway, away from the frost on the grass. She kept on to the mailbox by the road even when she smelled the smoke, but she flung herself around at the sound of the breaking glass. The house went up like a tinderbox, the tangerine-orange flames licking out of the smashed windows and igniting the shingles on the roof. Katie Ann back-stepped to the mailbox, leaned against the post, and watched her family’s home become engulfed in the blaze with equal parts regret and fascination. And she waited for Bez to come back out.

  The ground floor ignited more slowly than the second, where the fire must have started, and those windows also burst from the heat. Soon the front porch was subsumed in roiling flames that moved like ocean water, and only then did Bez-Short-for-Bezaliel, handsome as ever despite the shirt burning to ashes on his back, emerge from the inferno. The porch collapsed behind him, sending up a maelstrom of sparks and smoke and shooting flares that, for a moment, looked to Katie Ann Weber like wings.

  “Hi, baby,” he said.

  In the middle distance, sirens whined. Katie Ann’s eyes bulged and she tugged at the hem of her nightgown.

  “You best get out of here,” she warned. “They’ll want to put you in jail.”

  “I don’t mind,” Bez told her. “I can wait. For you, I can wait.”

  He rolled his shoulders and the last vestiges of his incinerated shirt dropped to the walkway where they smoldered. Bubblegum lights pulsed at the turnoff to Route 10, a quarter of a mile up the road.

  Beaumont housed no female inmates, and as such its infirmary was not equipped for the delicate business of childbirth, much less the birth of a child whose mother was unconscious. Nonetheless, the paramedics who answered the call decided not to transport her to the hospital, instead opting to deliver the baby themselves in the relative sterility of the infirmary. Capsule after capsule of ammonia carbonate was snapped in her face, waking her long enough to bellow and push before passing out again to start over. In the end, the delivery took three hours. To the delight of the attending medics, it went as well as could be expected, given the circumstances, though Katie Ann passed out again before they could present to her the unusually heavy newborn baby girl. One last capsule brought her back, whereupon she gaped at her daughter, tears spilling freely down her apple-red cheeks, and then to the far end of the bright, white room where Bezaliel Horvath stood.

  He was nude, pale, the barbed-wire cross on his chest almost silver in the way it gleamed beneath the ceiling lights. A small smile played at his lips as he took a single step forward and held out his hands. Katie Ann smiled back at him, mouthed his name. Bezaliel canted his head to the left, crinkled his honest brown eyes. Behind him, a faint crackle erupted into a thunderous gust and fire climbed the walls.

  The flames spread, up and outward, taking the shape of broad, red wings. As Bezaliel resumed his approach, the wings kept pace. They were part of him now.

  The officer by the door withdrew his service pistol and drew a bead, center mass. The fire comprising Bezaliel’s wings shot at him in a spiraling column, igniting his uniform. The paramedics babbled and scrambled out of the way. Bezaliel reached for the swaddled child one of them held tight to his chest. The terrified medic froze momentarily, then handed the baby to her father.

  Bezaliel curled his left arm around the child and turned back to Katie Ann. His wings swung in a broad arc that overwhelmed the two medics with heat and flame. They shrieked and clawed at one another, at the walls, at the unbroken circle of hell that now surrounded them all.

  Katie Ann softly wept.

  “Bez.”

  He shushed her. “Quiet, daughter of man.”

  The child let loose a shrill wail. The angel bent at the waist and kissed Katie on the brow. What would have been the carpal joint on a bird’s wing brushed the ceiling and set it aflame.

  “When I saw you, I loved you,” he said, his voice gentle but not overpowered by the din of the blaze.

  “I was … the queen of ’em all,” she rasped.

  “Always, my love. Always.”

  With that, Bezaliel gave his bride a wink, shielded the puling baby with his arms, passed into the wall of fire and out of the infirmary.

  Katie Ann erupted into a spasming fit of smoky coughs, curled up on her side, and whispered—

  “How does she go?”

  —before the ceiling caved in on her of her and she breathed her last.

  (Pop!)

  Her Sweet Solace

  J. T. Glover

  Deanna slumps against the wall outside the kitchen, heart twisting like a downed power line as she listens to her faithless mother cry out. Tears drip from her bulging eyes, and she wonders why the neighbors haven’t called the cops. Then—silence, the scrape of a Bic lighter, and the rank smell of one of her mother’s Dorals.

  “God, I’ve been needing that,” her mother says, voice jagged. “You have no idea.”

  “Oh, I know,” comes a hollow voice, a Darth Vader voice that fits too perfectly. “Believe me, I know.”

  In her mind’s eye, Deanna sees the tableau again. Short North High out early after a fire drill, she has snuck in through the basement, gleefully imagining her mom’s shocked face when she jumps out at her. Now she crouches in the hall, peering around the corner. Her mother lies naked on the kitchen table, legs spread wide, feet planted flat on the green plastic tablecloth. Between Deanna and her mother is a man covered in purple flame. His head bobs at her mother’s crotch, and she’s moaning.

  Deanna sits by Mirror Lake, pitching stones into the water when no one’s looking, the setting sun occluded by the red-brick mass of Campbell Hall. After sneaking back out of the house, she drifted through the quiet streets of Harrison West, past the Victorian mansions of Neil Avenue, eventually stopping at the rock-lined pond on the Ohio State campus. Most of the benches were taken by couples, but eventually one opened up, overshadowed by lindens and grubby with sap. It suits her mood just fine, and everyone ignores her—pallid girl with lank brown hair, camo coat not quite ratty enough to be cool, eyes permanently squinted from too many nights spent reading the latest Kim Harrison or Patricia Briggs.

  What do I do? she thinks, worrying at a nail. Dad hasn’t even been gone a year. This is crazy. What the hell was that thing she was …

  Deanna grinds her teeth, the tang of bile welling up in her throat. She saw something in her house. A man—no, a thing—covered in purple fire, going down on her mother.

  Purple fire, she thinks. This isn’t fucking True Blood. This is my life, and—

  �
��There’s no fucking demons,” she growls, stomach clenching.

  The sudden silence from the next bench over suggests it’s time to move on, so she heads up the path to the library, hands in her pockets, just wanting to be able to deal. Everything she planned to do tonight suddenly hazy and unimportant, from studying for Spanish to practicing for Tuesday’s piano lesson with Miss Colette. The library looms in front of her, a great glass-fronted pile of Indiana limestone rubbed smooth by long-dead masons, and she wonders if she’s losing her mind.

  Most people who see demons are schizo. Who says you aren’t?

  A group of ROTC cadets jog past, cadence booming off the library’s façade, and she stares after them, absently wondering how she’s supposed to judge her own sanity. She looks at her palms, at the divots that have crusted into sticky scabs. They don’t prove a damn thing—just that she clenched her fists.

  Suddenly Deanna yawns, jaws cracking, thinking of food for the first time since lunch, and she wishes she had a boy to hold her. The anger draining away, she’s only worried for her mother. Whatever she saw, her mom’s in danger.

  So what do I do? How am I supposed to ask her anything?

  She can’t, of course. If she’s going crazy, the questions will start, and then pills and a rubber room. If she’s not crazy, then … what? Deanna stares at the moon rising through the trees, yellow and gravid like a rotten grapefruit, trying to solve a problem without an answer.

  This time Deanna enters through the front door, and the house is silent. The yellow glow from the streetlights leaks into the living room through the Venetian blinds. The furniture she’s grown up with—the aubergine couch, the glass-top coffee table, the blue corduroy easy chair where her daddy used to watch Law & Order and drain cans of Genesee—has become strange to her. Devils and bad ghosts wait around every corner.

  “Mom … ?”

  No reply, so she walks down the hall. The door to her parents’ bedroom, now her mother’s, is half-closed, the lights off. She stops, trying to decide whether to open the door all the way.

  “Deanna, come in here,” her mother says from within. “Please don’t turn on the light.”

  Deanna hesitates, then walks into the dark room, bumping her knee against the chest of drawers, just like always. She edges over to the bed and gingerly lowers herself onto the duvet.

  “Baby,” her mom whispers, and now Deanna can hear it in her voice, the cracked tone her mother gets after crying. “You’re way late. What happened?”

  “I’m sorry, mom. Tara asked if I wanted to go catch a matinee at the Lennox, and then we went over to Stauf’s for coffee.”

  “Okay. I just worry, that’s all. Your phone?”

  “Need to charge it. Sorry.”

  To this her mother doesn’t respond. Deanna can’t see it in the darkness, but she senses her fumbling around on the nightstand. In the brief flare of the lighter, her mother’s face is a war of grief and shame, desire and sorrow. The grooves left by her father’s death, by the smoke she sucks into her lungs, silence the careful questions Deanna planned on the walk home.

  She’s startled when her mother’s hand covers her own on the bed sheet. Slowly, hesitantly, Deanna grips her mom’s hand back and they sit there in silence. Her nose itches at the smoke, and she can imagine the blue cloud around her head, but tonight she doesn’t say anything.

  “Dinner’s in the fridge if you want it,” her mother says. “It’s not much, but I made a potato-bacon casserole this afternoon.”

  So Deanna gets up and starts to walk out of the room, running a frustrated hand through her hair, stops when her mother speaks again.

  “I wish your father were still here, sweetie. I miss Friday nights.”

  Deanna smiles in spite of herself. Before the tumor came, he’d been adamant about Friday nights, regardless of what plans her friends might have. Pizza, beer for her parents and Coke for her, and board games. Every goddamn Friday night—Monopoly, Axis & Allies, Scrabble. She’d hated it at the time, of course. Her mom had tried to get them to start again a few months after he was gone, but they’d both felt the hollowness.

  “I know, Mom. Me too.”

  She walks down the hall to the living room and into the kitchen, mulling things over. Nothing in her mother’s voice but sadness—like Deanna hasn’t heard from her since the night in the hospice when he took that slow, final breath.

  What the hell, she thinks. She’s grief-stricken, and I’m crazy. Thanks for leaving us, Dad. Way to go.

  Deanna opens the vintage 1970 refrigerator’s olive green door and peers around for the casserole. From the other end of the house comes the sound of muffled sobbing, and she turns toward it, unsure what to do. That’s when Deanna sees the wrinkles and blisters in the tablecloth. She looks closer and feels her face writhe through a half-dozen expressions—twisting like plastic exposed to high heat.

  Saturday afternoon, and Deanna stands looking through the grubby windows of Magickal Kingdom, hands wrapped around her backpack’s straps, but soon she’s going to have to decide. Gray clouds threatening overhead, and it’s not exactly the nicest block of High Street. Most of the other businesses nearby are long closed, bottles and dead condoms mounded in the doorways. A scruffy guy in an Indians jacket stands at the bus stop across the street, legs spread wide and nodding at her as he points at his crotch.

  The bells hanging from the door tinkle as she pushes it open and steps inside. It’s not as dark as it looks from the sidewalk, and lamps with colorful shades give the place a warm, inviting feel. Still, she gazes apprehensively at the shelves, higgledy-piggledy with jars and incense and all sorts of things she doesn’t recognize, unsure where to go next.

  “Can I help you?” asks the large, acne-scarred woman behind the counter.

  “Yeah,” Deanna says, scrounging in her coat pocket for the list she wrote out that morning as she sat in the library, surrounded by herds of dusty books. “I need a whole bunch of stuff. Maybe it’d just be easier if I gave you the list.”

  The woman smiles pleasantly and takes the sheet of paper. She starts to read it, then wrinkles her brow and looks up at Deanna.

  “I don’t want to sound rude, but how old was the book you got these ingredients from?”

  “Well, it was—”

  “No one uses measures like this anymore. I mean, everyone uses some kind of measurement, but the Craft isn’t about seven drams of clarified Abyssinian goat essence, whatever that is.”

  Deanna doesn’t say anything, not trusting herself to speak as she feels the quivering in her lips, just nods.

  “Hey, hey, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, or stop you from doing what you’re trying to do. Why don’t you tell me what you want, and maybe we can put something together?”

  Deanna looks at the woman, wondering if she’s ever watched a person being used by a demon—what one old French grimoire called an amator diabolicus—her very life draining away in the guise of sexual release. The shopkeeper sits there, silver-ringed fingers folded on the counter, and she looks as if she was born into the wood-and-raffia necklace that hangs down over her velvet dress. A nice woman, yes, and maybe a good confidante for lonely outsiders, but she hasn’t seen everything.

  “It’s a banishment ritual,” Deanna says. “Just trying to get rid of some negative influences.”

  “All right, lots of ways to do that. Given the feel of this list, I’m guessing it’s pretty serious. Let’s start with the ferric salts … ”

  Twenty minutes later, Deanna is considerably more impressed, watching as the woman grinds dozens of ingredients together in a stone mortar, all the while talking confidently about the properties associated with each.

  “So these are ingredients that have been used for a long time?” Deanna asks, starting to hope.

  “All my herbs and minerals are traditional. This isn’t a food chemistry lab, and we aren’t making Twinkies,” she says with a laugh. “Much of what’s in here was used by the alchemists and ceremonial magi
cians of the Middle Ages, near as anyone can tell. Some were even used to summon or banish demons. Whatever you’re trying to get rid of, this is potent stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got serious problems.”

  “Yeah, well, this is serious magick,” the woman says with asperity as she finishes her grinding and pours the mortar’s contents into a paper bag. “Be careful how you use it. I don’t want to see you in here next month because your boyfriend’s moved to Manitoba and won’t return your calls. Now, do you know just what you’re going to do with this stuff?”

  “I’ve got some ideas,” Deanna says, smiling for the first time since looking into the kitchen, “but maybe you can give me a pointer or two.”

  Sunday afternoon is overcast and muggy, though it’s not June yet, and even the grass doesn’t want to move. Deanna stands quietly beside her mother, mood blacker than her dress, staring down at the grave, wishing she could feel the calm that usually comes in Union Cemetery. Whatever was right in the world last Sunday—whatever fragments of her life she’d managed to put right—has been derailed completely. Even her favorite stompy boots, the black ones with all the straps and buckles that made her father laugh, can’t comfort today. When her mother wraps one arm around her shoulders and starts snuffling, it’s all Deanna can do not to shove her down.

  What’s wrong with you?

  Her mother’s arm starts to shake, and then she’s sobbing, and Deanna finally puts an arm around her, grimacing but unable to help herself, two images warring in her mind. Her mother and father, laughing on their trip to the Hocking Hills in the autumn two years ago, and her mother wiping a smear of dirt from his face. Her mother and the fire-coated creature in the kitchen, coupling, pleasure in her father’s absence, him not even a year gone.

  “Oh, Deanna,” her mother says, voice trembling, “I miss him so much.”

  This sets off a fresh storm of tears, her mother’s like a mask out of Greek tragedy. Deanna wraps both arms around her, staring through the fence at the steady stream of cars and SUVs passing on Olentangy. She holds her mother’s shaking, running-to-flab frame and wishes she were anywhere else.