Demon

“You need a sense of context, that larger picture. As I said before, I can give you that. But you have to hear me out.”

As she said all of this, I found myself drawn to her in a wholly different way than I had before, against judgment, against instinct. And perhaps this was the grandest seduction of it all: that she was right.

“Don’t worry about anything else. Simply write down what I tell you. Each word. Everything. And then you’ll know it is real and you are sane.”

“I can’t remember each word. My mind is shattered, can’t you tell?” But even as I said this, I knew I could recite that first conversation verbatim if I wanted to. Even now the full flow of that conversation came over me, as though summoned by the mere act of thinking of it, our exchanges of that night and this one intertwining and overlapping like competing melodies in my mind.

“You’ll remember.”

She glanced at her watch and frowned. The ankh swung in the window of her neckline as she gathered her coat. I had been transfixed by that view before, but found I could hardly look at it now.

She . . . he . . . it left, as it had before, without preamble. I come to you at great risk, Lucian said the first night. What, exactly, had the demon meant by that?

I SPENT THE NEXT two weeks going through the motions of a job that seemed suddenly meaningless. I checked the time, the date, my calendar, with a regularity that bordered on obsession. I wrote down and read—and then reread—my accounts of both encounters, though I didn’t need to. As promised, I hadn’t forgotten one word of either. I began to think that this was the real demonic trick: to trap me in this limbo—less dead than before, not quite alive.

And then the mysterious L appeared again.

3

Trying to get away from my home before the appointed time, I noticed the church down the street with new eyes, saw it for perhaps the first time as more than scenery on the way elsewhere. A moment later I was checking the doors—it was Saturday, after all. But they admitted me easily, and I found myself loitering in the narthex until, with great hesitation, I entered the sanctuary.

I chose a creaky pew toward the back.

I immediately felt out of place. I hadn’t been to church in years, and then only for holidays or weddings. I was conscious of every sound, of the still postures of those few sitting or kneeling in the pews ahead of me. I wondered if, having been in the presence of a demon, I would conversely better notice the presence of God.

But I felt nothing.

In the last week I’d been tempted to search through the boxes remaining in my spare room for my old confirmation certificate. But I couldn’t bear the idea of discovering something of Aubrey’s, of even seeing her writing on the side of the box from the first time it had been used when we moved in together. Ultimately, I decided a weathered certificate would shed light on nothing. Nothing could have prepared me for this. I couldn’t remember Pastor Feagan ever teaching about demons, or even the devil, except in the vaguest terms.

Not that God had been a specific notion to me, either. God was as real as the gravity on Jupiter or the expansion of the universe. Conceptually significant, yes—especially if one studied astronomy or lived on Jupiter—but nothing I expected to know much about, firsthand, in this world. I had always subscribed to the more modern belief that religion was fraught with contradictions, the product of an overgrown oral tradition that only the fanatical tried to package neatly as one tries to tame kudzu.

And, as Lucian had aptly observed, I’d never needed religion to be a good person. My father brought that out in me on his own. Never a perfect man, his temper would lie dormant for weeks at a time, waiting to erupt at the first sign of any misdeed or bad grade. Silence was a good sign, no news always the good kind. With an upbringing like that, there had been no need for God

A stretch of afternoon light angled across several pews as the church door opened. A moment later a black man in a denim jacket entered my pew from the other side and sat down next to me. He smelled like sandalwood and soap. My gaze slid to my watch.

4:15 p.m.

“I wondered if you’d be able to walk through the door.” I kept my eyes fixed on the altar, on the cross atop it.

“Lucifer himself has access to the throne room of God. Do you think a church is any problem for me?” His voice was a warm baritone that did not need whispers to be kept between us.

“How can that be?”

“Why would it not be? Neither of us is evil by design.”

“Because you were angels, you mean.”

“I was. Lucifer is a cherub.”

With some confusion I conjured chubby-winged children in diapers and practically heard his answering scowl. “It isn’t what you’re thinking,” he said, more loudly than before. “The cherubim are the highest of our order, the most powerful of us all. Know that on Lucifer’s creation, El called him perfect.”

I turned toward him, openly studying him now. He had a broad forehead and long, high cheekbones. The angular lines of a short moustache exactly delineated the curve of his upper lip, which was perfectly matched to the lower one. A hint of stubble smattered his chin and neck, like lichen growing on a great, smooth stone.

“He called him perfect with good reason. Lucifer was his masterwork. He was powerful, anointed by God, and so very beautiful.”

I thought I heard him sigh.

“Then what about seraphim?” I asked, not because of any spectacular knowledge of my own, but according to literary lore, CHERUBIM and SERAPHIM had once been the license plates on Anne Rice’s two limousines.

“The seraphim are fearsome fighters, but the cherubim outrank them. And then there are the archangels.