Demon

DREAMED of sandwich wraps, of blonde, wavy hair, of that smile, that terrible smile, of the jogger and her faceless husband.

I woke with a start. It was well past 3:00 a.m. I walked on steady legs into my living room to fumble with the lamp, wanting to banish the dark.

At my desk I woke the laptop, bypassed my calendar, and began my search for Jake Salter. It took me a while to find him, finally, on my high school alumni page under Passings. Deaths were listed by year.

“Jake Salter ’86. Youth pastor, Our Savior’s Church, Independence, MO.”

I STAYED UP UNTIL dawn exorcising the conversation in the sandwich store onto the page. When it was done, I determined I would not add it to my account. It was out of my system and that was all that mattered. I could sleep now—for days, if I wished. I could find a new job. But I was determined that I would not go back to the story. That I would leave it like a poisonous thing, a horror story come to life, a demon game that kills its human players like a bad B movie.

But by six that morning I was writing, adding my reactions to the belated revelations about Jake Salter and the jogger in the Garden, the shape of Lucian’s mouth as she screamed at me . . . waking up under the scarf and care of Mrs. Russo, White Shoulders and angora fuzz in my nostrils.

Some time after ten o’clock, I pushed back from my desk. I went to the kitchen for a snack and one of the bottles of juice Mrs. Russo had left in my refrigerator along with sliced turkey, provolone cheese, and a quart of milk. Cans of vegetable soup, a loaf of bread, and an assortment of fresh fruit sat on my counter. She had done it in spite of my protests, saying it was a privilege to serve me, that she had been “burdened” for me, as she put it, for months now.

I was just returning to my desk with a partially eaten apple when I stopped and stared at the screen.

It was the Is that jumped out at me. The first-person narrative. The story encasing the story.

I sat down slowly, my fingers sticky, the chunk of apple like Styrofoam in my mouth.

And I saw, as I had that day in Belmont, the deconstruction of everything on that page—not as a pile of wood and metal rubble, of furniture legs and earth—but of two stories: Lucian’s . . .

And mine.

My story is very closely connected to yours, he had said. My story is ultimately about you.

And then, just yesterday: My story has given way to yours.

As I stared at the narrative I on the screen, at my every fear, incredulous amazement, and myriad questions, I realized that indeed, it had.

I had written a tale, the main character of which was not Lucian, the demon, but I.

I SPENT ALL DAY rereading it, the entire thing, with new eyes. Each word from Lucian’s mouth imbued with new and sinister meaning. I saw myself no longer floating along the eddies of Lucian’s story as I had thought, but caught now, dead center in the current.

Between two firing armies.

I reconsidered the phone call in the middle of the night. The pair of women at the Bristol Lounge. The man on the train. I had thought myself the observer in all of this but found now that I had been the one being observed and that this conflict had come to include me.

A war, Lucian called it. A satanic grudge match against an omniscient God who loved his human creation. A God I did not know.

I wanted to rail as he had railed, to accuse him, but I knew without checking that my calendar remained untouched.

The demon had left me.

He had accomplished his purpose. He had put up his story like so much window dressing, spinning his tale as deftly as a spider, and it had been a distraction to me, as solid and real as the stately houses in Belmont. And just as the mansions were that day before my eyes—crumbled to the ground, ruined—I now stood stripped of all things I once was: husband, editor, would-be writer. An honest man. A “good man.”

Worst of all, I was alone. Who could I talk to? Who could I tell who would not consider me a madman? I had lost Aubrey and alienated Sheila. I had not seen any of my supposed friends for months. I could call my sister, but where would I start, and if I did, how would she ever believe me?

I thought of Mrs. Russo, the kind, praying warrior who kept even the brash Lucian at bay. How could I tell even her?

I cancelled my doctor’s appointment. I vacillated between desperation and fear. I could not spend my life like this, but if I had inadvertently wandered into a battlefield of opposing spiritual forces, neither did I want to become yet another piece of collateral damage.

I returned to the online Bible, compared it again with my account—and I saw now that it was truly my account—of our every interaction. But while Lucian had finished his tale of jealousy, revenge, and his probable end, I knew—with the sense of one who has spent his entire life reading stories—that mine was not finished.

TWO DAYS LATER, I knocked on Mrs. Russo’s door. I had no idea what I would say, what to even ask for. But I knew she could help me find it.

When she pulled it open, she did not greet me with her characteristic smile and “Hello, dear!” but told me to come in even as she hurried into the kitchen.

She was breathing quickly, her hands hesitating in the air before her as though they had forgotten what they were about.

I had expected to come in, to search for words, to be afraid to look into those aging hazel eyes. That she seemed flustered was even more unsettling.

“Open that refrigerator, Clay, and take out the perishables. You need to take them.”