answer.
No one.
I LOCKED MYSELF IN my apartment for two days. I slept in fits on my sofa, refused to open my laptop for fear of what I would find on my calendar, and ate Mrs. Russo’s muffins. Though I had never suffered from agoraphobia, I began to understand how easily I could become one of those people who refused to leave their home. I wondered if any of them had been stalked by demons.
On the second day I found myself rationalizing what happened in the Garden. Lucian really had tripped. When he murmured, he was merely talking to himself, calling himself clumsy and cursing his human body. Maybe he made an appreciative comment—she had been an attractive blonde, after all. That he disappeared when he did meant nothing; he routinely disappeared when I wasn’t ready or whenever I wasn’t paying close attention.
Anything to explain it. The truth was too appalling.
Sometime into the second day, after calling in sick again, I retrieved the stack of notes from my desk drawer. The summary account of my demonic encounters to date consisted of portions of two notebooks, of random pages stuck inside the cover of one, and the backs of a few pages from the recycle box. The last of these pages was scrawled in wild, volatile script. I had started to write about the Common and the Garden the night of the accident but never finished—mostly because I could not reconcile reality with Lucian’s strange behavior and the events that followed.
The other reason was that I was drunk.
Lying on the sofa and reading through my notes up to that day, I began to feel a strange sense of control—over my words, if nothing else, as though I had captured and contained events that defied rationality. The page brought order, a shape to all experience, the comfort of events scripted into story.
I picked up my pen and began to write, chasing reason, meaning, sanity.
8
After three days in my tiny apartment—the false, mundane world shut out beyond my door—my denial made its pendulum swing to reckless acceptance. The mad ruminations, the nightmares, the panic gave way to exhaustion until, in my depleted state, it became very simple: I could never return to my in-transit, post-divorce life. My life might never be normal again, but I could not keep to these sequestered shadows forever. I was tired of playing the specter in my own life, of huddling behind the flimsy lock of my apartment door.
Lucian had the power to kill me—he had proven that much. And if that’s what he wanted, there was nothing I could do about it.
But I didn’t think that’s what he wanted.
For whatever reason, he desperately wanted to tell me his story. He wanted it written and published. And though I had no intention of doing either, I had the power to give him both.
Like a fever, my fear broke.
The next morning, I lowered my chin into the collar of my coat. I did not look into anyone’s eyes on the street, nor did I make my routine stop at the bagel joint near the
Nothing like that happened.
When I passed Sheila’s desk, she asked how I was feeling. She had circles under her eyes but managed a small smile that still managed to look attractive. She had always been like that—almost prettier when suffering. It used to tug at my heart, and it brought back the old envy I had felt toward Dan when he first started seeing her. Even when her mother died, she had been beautiful, a weeping Madonna at the funeral. Today, however, that trait struck me like a line repeated one too many times. I murmured something about the stomach flu and feeling better. I didn’t want to talk to her.
“Oh, Clay,” she called after me. “Your nine o’clock is waiting for you in your office. She came early.”
I hesitated. I hadn’t opened my calendar in two days and therefore had no idea who was in there.
No, I had one idea.
I veered off into the bathroom. The trembling was back in my hands. I heard again the hopping skid of tires against pavement, the thud of the collision. The back of my neck felt clammy despite the chill of the morning lingering in my fingers and on my cheeks.
So much for bravado. He had never let me escape him for long. The last time—the only time—I walked away from him, he had infiltrated my dreams. Breathing deeply, I walked myself through my conundrum to the conclusion that had freed me from my apartment prison: For whatever reason, I held the keys to something he wanted very much.
I reshouldered my bag, which was stuffed full of the same untouched proposals I had taken home with me last Friday, and walked resolutely to my office. The door was ajar, and a vibrant female voice seemed to fill up all the space behind it. I knew that voice, and it was no demon. Well, not technically.
“Clay!” Katrina turned from the window, clapping her phone shut. Her coat was thrown over the chair in front of my desk, the upside-down Burberry tag staring out like the vacant smile of a doll. “You look good. Have you lost weight?”
I unloaded my bag as she told me about her train ride in, her new apartment in the city, her latest stash of exciting new proposals, her growing stable of up-and-coming writers. I docked my laptop but didn’t turn it on.
“I’ll take a look at whatever you have,” I said. Despite the fact that she tired me out, she never gave me shoddy stuff, and I needed some fast acquisitions.
She hesitated, and I realized she was weighing the stacks of proposals, queries, and boxed manuscripts on my credenza and bookshelf. I was either more backed up than usual or had grown in popularity.
“They haven’t hired a new editorial assistant, have they.” She sat down on the Burberry-covered chair with crossed arms, peering out at me over the fine arch of her nose—which was probably as designer as the rest of her. Her nostrils tended to look like slits—until she got excited about something, in which case they flared. “How are you doing Clay, really?”
