We entered a residential area of large, rolling yards. Iron fences enclosed wooded drives, old elms screened houses buttoned tight by latched iron gates. I recognized this Belmont neighborhood; in college I had attended a party here at the family home of a friend-of-a-friend. I had been struck by the sheer size of the house, awed by the French table clocks, chinoiserie secretaries, and mahogany sideboards that whispered “heirloom” and “old money,” each of them at anachronistic odds with the modern security system panels and television sets. Someone had set a sweating beer bottle on top of a Queen Anne table and I had discretely removed it, trying to save the old oak the indignity of a ring.
For years I returned whenever I found myself in the area, to admire the gabled roofs and columned porticoes, the dark shutters and diamond-paned windows, to tell myself that when I got caught up at work, I would pull out one of my own manuscripts and finish it. And when that day came—the one with the six-figure advance and movie deal—I would buy a place here where my kids could play on the lawn or ride their Big Wheels in front of the garage, where our two family cars—one of them an SUV and the other an Audi sedan—were parked inside. When the kids were old enough, they could go off to the local private school, complete with its own ice-hockey rink.
I indeed finished the manuscript and sold it in a three-book deal as the Coming Home series. But I never bought the house. The first book sold fewer than 3,500 copies, and the series was cancelled after the release of the second. Had it stayed in print long enough, I was sure it would have done better, but the unsold copies returned too quickly, their shelf space surrendered to higher volume tenants.
Lucian pulled over in front of a stately brick Tudor covered with ivy. I was not surprised to recognize the curved front entry, the door like an upside-down
The demon squinted at it through the passenger window, his forearm resting on the steering wheel. I expected him to crow his knowledge of my having come here, to regale me with the story of how I made out with Deanna Blair in an upstairs bedroom, then drop the bomb that she was dead or paralyzed or kidnapped in Colombia. But he was silent. I found it unnerving.
“Why are we here?”
He turned in the seat and regarded me. “I’ve thought a long time about telling you this, gone back and forth on it. I’m not sure about it, even now, but look—we’re here, and I promised to tell you everything.”
He seemed to wait for some indication of my understanding.
“The world is not as you see it,” he said finally. “Look at that house. So grand, so very upper-crust.”
“That it is,” I said warily.
“But here’s the thing: That house, the cars, the old furniture and interior decorating, even the landscaping—this physical world—is nothing but window dressing. Beneath all of that lies another realm altogether.
“The distinction between our two worlds is important for you to understand. It’s important for you to know that beneath the aesthetics of every temporal veneer lies a stratum of infallible truth: a spiritual realm, the world wiped clean of cosmetics.”
Now, as I looked again at that house, the heavy brick began to fall away, translucent as a frame in a ghost movie. And then the two upper levels silently collapsed, caving in the middle so that the stately old furniture, tables, and consoles with their curving legs and claw feet slid and then toppled through the crumbling floors. I had experienced Lucian’s tampering with my brain before in visions and dreams, but this—here, with my eyes bearing open witness to the very thing before me—was disconcerting. I jerked in my seat, but it, too, had become transparent. And then we were no longer seated in a cab but standing on a street that was no longer paved, in front of a yard that was nothing but earth and rock.
In my vision, my waking hallucination, he turned to me. “I’m aware of every detail you’ve admired about that place: the great deck out back, the vaulted ceilings, the crystal light fixtures, and old oak floors. The grandeur, the status, the sheer custom cost of it all. But I see nothing more than your fancy tissue paper: brightly colored but fragile, fading, and easily torn, not to endure very well even the short span of your lifetime.”
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, where the house, the raised flower beds, the turret spire, and the iron gate had been, there was nothing but a pile of brick and rubble, dry dirt and stone. On the ground perhaps ten feet from me lay the splintered foot of a Queen Anne table, the cabriole wizened as though a century had had its inevitable way with it in the space of that instant.
A car motored past us on the street, and we were in the cab once more as a postman pulled over in front of the bronze mailbox. The house was restored to its opulence, secure in its legacy, anchored in privilege to the manicured lawn.
The demon tilted his head back against the window. “I see beyond the comforts of the amenities you seek all your life—the money, the hobbies, the alluring distractions that promise temporal gratification. Though humans claim to plumb the depths in search of meaning, I find they tend to settle for whatever drifts across the surface.”
He had given me something. I knew that, for whatever reason, he had granted me a concession in showing me this thing, without which he might have shared his story just as cohesively and in a more expedient fashion. And I wondered why. To unsettle me? I was indeed unsettled—seeing the embodiment of my dreams ravaged before me resonated with strong, discordant notes.
He raised a finger. “Granted, every now and then a human comes along with extraordinary discernment, a gift for seeing the world—if only for momentary glimpses—with near-angelic acumen. It’s unnerving.”
“Why?”
“It’s like peering into a roomful of shadows and having one of them step forward to look you directly in the face. Humans shouldn’t see so clearly.”
“Do you think angels—demons, whatever—have a monopoly on truth?” I asked, not without defensiveness.
He sat up, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “No. We’re simply better equipped to see it. Why? Because we aren’t looking at the world through soft and pulpous eyes like you, but through the iris of truth. It is neither obscured from us nor spared us.”
“I want to know what this has to do with me.”
