Demon

“I’ve heard.”

“He had auburn hair, bald on top—”

“It doesn’t matter what he looked like. He could be one of millions.”

“Of Legion?”

“I suspect he was with the Host.”

“And last night?”

“I suspect the other.”

I shivered, felt the sharp claws of anxiety inside my chest. In these meetings, these times together, we had existed in a world of story, separate from the spiritual and corporeal worlds we came from. Now, in the last twenty-four hours, I felt those three realms commingling in a volatile fusion of fiction, speculation, and every concrete thing that constituted life in this tangible world. And I felt it with a strange excitement mixed with grave fear.

“How can both want—or not want—the same thing?”

“The Host, because the truth is already available if you seek it. The Legion, because they don’t want you finding it.” He said this with too much calm, and that maddened me.

“Why then? Why have you done it?” My hands were trembling again, as they had after the phone call last night.

“I’ve told you that as well.”

“What will happen to me because I did this? Will they put a hit out on me? Am I going to hell?”

Tires skidding on pavement . . .

He studied me. “You asked me once where you were going. I said I didn’t know. Where do you think you’re going, Clay?”

“I—I don’t know! How am I supposed to know?” For the first time in weeks, months, I wanted my old life back, that pre-Oz gray I had known before the world was imbued with strange colors. I wanted back my simpleminded fixation on the marriage I’d ruined, the wife I’d been unable to keep. My failures as a husband and a man had been a comfort compared to these new terrors.

But I might as well have tried to crawl back into the womb. “How much time do we have?”

“Not much. Listen to me. The Host will not wait for you to talk but will speak first. A member of the Host doesn’t come to you because you want it to or because you try to summon it. You might indeed summon an angel, but it’ll likely be a fallen one. As I’ve said, even our master masquerades as an angel of light when it suits him.”

I thought of my e-mail, of the call later that night. I had felt exposed, vulnerable, all day. “What will we do?”

“What do you mean what will we do?”

“What do we do?”

“We finish the story.” As he leaned forward, elbows on the edge of the table, his fingers laced together, I saw the heavy stainless steel timepiece on his wrist. I did not consider then that I should have stopped him. That this answer should have been unsatisfactory. That to proceed in light of what was happening defied logic. I was focused on the singular point my universe had shrunk to: my book.

“One day, not so long after the crucifixion and resurrection and after the God-man departed, I awoke to a realization. It was as though I had been standing on the brittle edge of a melting lake. Looking down at the crumbling ice before me and the depths below it, a sense of exclusion settled upon me. I was aware that I stood on the fringe of damnation. This was far worse than my initial sense after the fall that something awaited me on the road ahead, because now here it was, a yawning pit.” The bluntness of his stare was a touch psychotic.

“All that might have saved me, El had made available to you. You. You again. And because of it, you might never stand where I stood, on that brittle cusp. How deeply, how madly I loathed you.

“Now you know why fear and jealousy have become twin children to us: Something endeared you to him, something beyond the attachment of a creator for his creation—for we, too, were created. Something beyond what we were capable of, something beyond our control—and yours, too. For that alone, I hated you. For the love of God there was no word for the ill I bore you. That is when you truly became my enemy.”

“You mean . . . when humans became the enemy of the Legion.”

“No. I am both representative and individual. And this is the crux of it, Clay. I believe that if you were the only one, had been the only human ever—yes, just you—it would not have changed a thing. I would still be as I am, and he would love you so much.”

I stared.

“That look on your face, that’s how I feel. Baffled. Because what are you humans but insects? Holy blood for insects. It’s as incongruous as diamonds in mud. It wasn’t enough that he gave you his breath—he gave you his blood as well. Life physical and spiritual. He gave you everything. What makes you so special? Don’t pull away! I ask again: Why you? You. You!” He banged a fist on the table. The businessman with his laptop glanced up. “It all comes down to you. Always, you!”

Leave. You need to leave.

I don’t know where the thought came from, whether from fear or offense, self-preservation or another source altogether. I stood.

The demon watched me lazily. “You asked me where you were going. Do you think you should go to heaven, Clay?”

“I guess so,” I said, warily, as though he were a wild animal.